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In this video, we're going to take a look at the settings for WordPress and many of these settings 
set up the underlying platform for your entire site, so they're pretty important. We're here in the 
admin area and on the left at the bottom is the Settings sub nav. If you simply click settings it 
takes you right to the first one, which is general. Here we have the site, title and tagline. Now 
these are the same things that we changed in the customiser. It's the exact same piece of 
information so if you change it here and then go to the customiser, you'll see it different there. 
That means you don't have to set it here if you don't want to. You could go ahead and set it in the
customiser if you wanted. Next is the WordPress address and the site address. If you're only 
running WordPress on your site, these two should be the same. If you have a site built with 
something else and then WordPress is a subdirectory like "/blog" or something like that, then your 
WordPress address would have "/blog" on it but the site address would be the top-level domain. If 
you change these to something that isn't a real web address, your site will immediately become 
inaccessible. The only way to fix it is to actually log into your database directly, find the 
address in the database and change it back. So please be very, very careful with this. Generally 
speaking, you would only ever want to change it if you were moving from one domain to another and 
the other one was actually already working. Aanother possible reason to change it is if you get SSL 
and you simply put an S right here. If you do that, WordPress will immediately log you out because 
you're accessing a whole new site but then you can just log right back in and pick up where you 
left off. Next is an email address. This is for the site administrator. This gets used for a 
variety of things, notably when new users sign up. Often if you have a contact form when someone 
fills it out this address is the default one for the form to get sent to. Nnext we look at 
membership. I have anyone can register turned off, which means not anyone can register but it's not
uncommon for people to turn this on and leave the default role at subscriber. I really recommend 
you not use any of the others for open subscription. I can't see a scenario where you might create 
a new role with limited specific access to things but generally I would recommend you leave this 
off. Now for word Ville, we might want to leave it on because we're a city and we want our citizens 
to be able to create an account, log in, leave comments and things like that. But, again, they 
should be subscribers. Next, we choose a time zone and this is important. Something you can do with 
blog posts is future date them and then when the date passes they Auto publish. However, if your 
time zone here is set to something like UTC and you set the publish date relative to your own time 
zone, you're going to be very surprised when it publishes at the wrong time. So make sure you set 
your time zone to something relative to the content to your site. I'm just going to put ours in the 
middle of the country and choose Chicago. Said we have date and time format and this is simply how 
dates are printed on the front of your site. They don't really impact when things publish or 
anything like that so this is personal preference. What day of the week the week starts. I like 
Sunday and then site language. As you can see, WordPress is translated into a wide variety of 
languages. We're going to keep English for this one. Now I'll save changes. Next let's take a look 
at writing. When we went over categorise I mentioned that every post must be at least one category 
by default it's uncategorised but you could set up something else. If you don't like the word 
uncategorised you could create a category called general and in here set that to be the default. The 
same goes for post format. By default, it's standard but if you choose to set up a site that is 
primarily photography you could make it image and then have to change it to standard if you wanted 
to do a post. Here we have the option to post via email and the way this works is you create an 
email account and then when you want to post you just send an email to that account. Then, right, 
here are the login settings for that account so that WordPress can log into that email account, 
check for new mail. If there is one, it grabs the contents and makes a post. This allows someone to 
post to their blog via email. There are many plugins to enhance this, to make it work even better, 
more smoothly and handle more things in your email. If you're going to be posting via email I 
recommend you look at some of the plugins and see what's available there. Here we have update 
services. Let's take a look at those. By default, when you do a blog post, WordPress sends a message 
to all of these sites to let them know that you did that, then all of these sites spread the word. 
That helps get your message out. Right now, we can't do that because of our site's visibility 
settings and we'll get to the visibility setting in just a few minutes. Next, let's look at reading. 
Here we have front page displays and we've covered this in the customiser as well. Our home page 
displays home and the posts is news. Right now, the news page shows at most 10 posts at a time. If 
you have more than 10 then it makes a Next button. You can set this to anything you want. If your 
posts are very short or you only show excerpts you might want to increase this to 20 or something so 
that your page gets a little longer. Or if your posts are full length on your archive page you might 
want to make this just two or three because your posts all could get long. Syndication feeds show 
the most recent ten items. Also syndication feeds are RSS and they're a way for other sites to see 
your content as it gets published. We'll take a look at that in another episode. For each article in 
a feed, show the full text or the summary. This, again, is related to your syndication feeds and 
here we have search engine visibility. Remember the bit about not being able to publish to those 
other sites? That's because, right now, I'm telling Google and other search engines do not index 
this site. I'm not public yet, please go away now. It says it's up to search engines to honour this 
request. Google always honors this request but there are some less reputable search engines that 
don't and they will go through your stuff and they will tell people about it. But, by and large, 
this works pretty well to keep important search engines from crawling your site. In our next video, 
we'll take a look at the rest of the settings in this area.