In the final video in this series, we’ll discuss how to configure the settings to optimize and get the most out of your WordPress site.

The Settings sub-panel contains all of the settings that determine how your site behaves, how you interact with your site, and how the rest of the world interacts with your site.

Covered in this video:

• General – Updating your site’s title and location, who may register an account at your blog, and how dates and times are calculated and displayed.
• Writing – Customizing the interface with which you write new posts.
• Reading – Deciding if you want posts—or a static page—to be displayed as your site’s homepage. How many posts are displayed at one time, and how to adjust RSS syndication feed features to determine how the information from your site is sent to a reader’s web browser or other applications.
• Discussion – Control the settings concerning incoming and outgoing comments, pingbacks and trackbacks, email notifications and the use of avatars.
• Media – Specify the maximum dimensions in pixels to use when inserting an image into the body of a post.
• Privacy – Choose whether you want your site to be indexed by search engines—like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!—or only to normal visitors.
• Permalinks – Create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.
• Miscellaneous – File upload settings, link tracking and support for custom “hacks”.

This video demonstrates some of the tools that WordPress provides to manage your blog, including importing and exporting your entire site. Covered in this video:

• Quick publishing via the Press This bookmarklet.
• The Category/Tag conversion tool.
• How to import posts and comments from other blog services.
• How to easily backup or export your WordPress content at any time.

This video demonstrates how to add new users to your WordPress site, and assign permissions based on roles.

The Authors & Users sub-panel enables you to set up new user accounts, as well as change user information, or delete users.

Covered in this video:

• How to add a new user in the Users > Add New sub-panel.
• How to edit or delete existing users.
• How to set individual permissions for each user.
• What roles and capabilities are available to each permission level?
• Editing your own profile and login information.

This video demonstrates how to find, install, and configure third-party plugins to add new functions and features to your WordPress site.

Plugins allow you to add new features to your WordPress blog that don’t come standard with the default installation. There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress, and with the Plugins sub-panel, finding, installing, and managing new plugins is easy!

Covered in this video:

• What are plugins, and what do they do?
• How to activate and deactivate plugins using the Plugins sub-panel.
• How to find new plugins directly from the Plugins > Add New sub-panel.
• Using the automatic plugin installer.
• Configuring a sample plugin.

In this video, you’ll learn how to use build custom navigation menus, including drop-down menu items.

In the Menus sub-panel, you can create one or more custom menus, for use in your site’s primary navigation menu, or other areas in our site. Custom menus may contain links to individual pages, categories archives, or even external URLs.

Covered in this video:

• How to create a new custom menu.
• Adding pages, categories and custom links to your newly-created menu.
• How to rearrange menu items.
• Creating nested, or drop-down menus.
• How to build multiple custom menus, and why.

In this video, we’ll learn what Widgets are, and how they can be used to easily add blocks of content to your site’s sidebar or footer.

Widgets are actually snippets of code that allow you to display blocks of customized information in your theme’s sidebar or footer. Widgets can be used to display your most recent posts and comments, archives, categories, or links in your sidebar or footer.

Covered in this video:

• What are widgets, and how do they appear on your website?
• How to add and edit widgets using the Appearance > Widgets sub-panel.
• How to rearrange the order of widgets in the sidebar of your site.
• Making the most of multiple widget areas.

From time to time, you might like to update the look and feel of your WordPress site. This video demonstrates how to change the look of your site by installing a new Theme.

From the Appearance sub-panel, you can change the entire look and feel of your site by installing and activating new themes, or by changing your existing theme. A theme is actually a bundle of files that determine the overall design of a site, including colors, graphics, layout, and fonts. There are literally thousands of WordPress themes available to choose from, running the entire gamut of both quality and price.

This video also covers how to add a custom background image or custom header graphic to your site design.

Covered in this video:

• How to find and install new themes.
• Updating the look of your site with one click using the Appearance sub-panel.
• Previewing changes before you activate a new theme.
• Editing the background and header in the default WordPress Theme, Twenty Ten.

There are two ways to easily add links to your WordPress site.

Most often, you’ll be creating links within your posts and pages, which will enable you to share related and useful content with your readers. But, you can also build a list of links that you’d like your readers to check out. This list of links can be displayed in your site’s sidebar (or elsewhere).

Use the Links > Add New sub-panel to share your favorite links with your visitors or recommend related resources, and sort your links into categories.

Covered in this video:

• How to easily create a link within a post or page.
• How to add new links to your sidebar using the Links > Add New sub-panel.
• Choosing the target or destination when your visitor clicks on a link.
• Organize your links into related link categories for easy navigation.
• Editing or deleting multiple links at once using the Links > Edit sub-panel.