A Wordpress site consist of two parts. There’s the part that your visitors see – the front end – and the part that you and the other administrators use – the back end. To access the back end go to http://youradress.com/wp-admin and enter your login. You’ll be greeted by the Wordpress Dashboard.
To the left you’ll find the menu. It’s divided into three parts, where each part contain tabs you can open. The first part is a link to your dashboard. The second part contain tabs that relate to your content. The third part contains your settings.
In this post I’ll show you how to set up your site. That means we’ll focus on the settings area, but we’ll also make a quick dive into the content area to discuss categories and tags. Again, doing this before creating content will save yourself some hassle.
Information architecture (or: The art of making people find your stuff easier)
You should know by now what you’re going to publish on your site. Be it daily experimental photos or the best of your portfolio, you need to organize your content so that people can go back and find previous material. I advised you to begin thinking about this when you chose your theme. I also mentioned that there are four prominent navigational elements built into Wordpress:
- Categories – Wordpress built-in category system.
- Tags – Keywords assigned to each post.
- Search – Wordpress built-in search feature.
- Chronological archives - Being a blogging software, Wordpress easily sort posts based on when they’re published.
Consider how you want your visitors to find your material. If you’re setting up a photoblog, chances are that tags along with the chronological archive works best. If you’re working with your new portfolio, you’ll probably want to organize your work into categories (maybe something like black and white, colour, portrait and landscape). Your theme probably take care of the search and chronological archives, so you’ll have to think about the categories and tags.
Now is the time to sit down with a piece of paper again. Carefully examine what you intend to do and what content you’ll publish. Sort it all into understandable hierarchies that are at most two levels deep (a master category and a child category). You don’t do this because there’s a limit in Wordpress, but because having more is counterintuitive to what you want to achieve – ease of use for your visitors. The hierarchy you produce here will give you a sense of your categories.
Next, look at your potential content and find ten to fifteen keywords that will suit most of them (imagine that you’ll have 100 pieces of content). These are likely to be your tags. If they’re too specific you’ll have tags with only one photograph, and if they’re too general all of your photos will be tagged with that term. You don’t want either of that to happen.
When you start adding content to your new site keep these lists in mind. Don’t be afraid to change them if you notice you have to, but use them as a guide. Sorting old content into new systems is a pain, but you’ve just eliminated the risk of messing up bigtime. Well done!
Important settings
The last thing you should do is go through the settings area and configure it to your needs. Here are the most important ones you shouldn’t miss:
- General site settings: open the Settings tab and click on General. There you’ll find general information about your site. Take special note of blog title, tagline (if used in your theme), e-mail address and timezone.
- Comments: next click on Discussion. Here you’ll be able to determine who’ll be able to comment on your site and if you want to moderate the comments before they’re visible to visitors. I usually set this so that anyone can comment without moderation, but I’ll get an e-mail when a new comment is made – it stimulates conversation better.
- Media settings: if you head to Media next you’ll get to make changes to automatically generated image sizes. This is important to change if your theme requires it. I’ve written a short how-to on the subject.
- URLs: heading on to Permalinks you get to control what your URL structure should look like. The default is an ugly query string that you definitely don’t want. Select a more appropriate here or craft one of your own. If you plan on using the chronological archive the day and name option is appropriate. If you rely on a more category-heavy categorization the custom /%category%/%postname%/ is a good choice.
And that, my friend, is actually the end of Wordpress for Photographers 1. You’ve now learned to evaluate if you need a website and if Wordpress could fill that need, how to install the standalone version of Wordpress, and configured it to get a head start. It’s been a long road, but you’re now ready to start adding content and getting people to notice your site. Please, don’t be afraid to show off your site or ask questions in the comments below!
Other resources on setting up your Wordpress installation
- The Codex – In the codex you’ll find a walkthrough on the different administration panels as well as a beginner’s guide. They’re both great reads if you’ve got any problems.
- Building a Wordpress blog people want to read – This book has plenty of tips on setting up a Wordpress site. It’s not photo oriented, but a lot of the advice is applicable. I’ll review this soon-ish.
- Weblogtools – Keith Dsouza has a quick Walkthrough of the different settings.
- Shout Me Loud – Harsh Agrawal gives us his essential Wordpress settings to do after installation.
