You’ve successfully completed The Famous 5-Minute Installation and your WordPress blog is shouting, “Hello world!”

Now what?

In this article, I’ll give you a quick tour of the Options Panel in the WordPress Administration and give you my recommended settings for a new blog. I’ll also provide quick links to the relevant documentation on the WordPress Codex.

If you’re completely new to WordPress, you’ll also want to have a look at my Getting Started With WordPress: Administration Quick Tour.

Note: If you haven’t already installed WordPress, you’ll find the instructions in Installing WordPress. I recommend installing WordPress in its own directory; see Giving WordPress Its Own Directory.

General Options

You can accept the default for many of the settings you’ll find in the General Options subpanel, but lets look at all of the options:

1. The weblog title should already be filled in, but you’ll want to change the tagline.
2. Check your WordPress address and Blog address. Remember, if you’ve given WordPress its own directory, you’ll need to change the Blog address here.
3. Check your email address.
4. If you will have members or want users to register to post comments, check the appropriate boxes under Membership. Then select the New User Default Role from the popup menu. For more information on roles, see Role.
5. Set the date and time. Enter the difference between your time and UTC time in the Times in the weblog should differ by box (you can check that this is correct by looking at the Output under the Default time format after you’ve updated your options). I prefer m.j.y date formatting (which looks like 11.28.06) and g:i a formatting for the time (which looks like 12:53 pm), but you can set it to suit your preferences. See Documentation on date formatting.
6. If you’ll be displaying a calendar on your blog, set the Weeks in the calendar should start on: Sunday from the popup menu (this is the standard, at least in the U.S.).

For more information, see General Options SubPanel.

Writing Options

There are a few important settings to be aware of here.

1. I recommend changing the Size of the post box. What you enter here is a matter of personal preference. I have a large monitor, so I’ve entered 30 lines, giving me plenty of room to view my post. But note that I don’t recommend writing your post in WordPress. Write it in a separate text editor (Journler is excellent for this, if you’re a Mac user) and paste it into WordPress. Use the WordPress admin only for making minor corrections, such as fixing a typo or broken link. This is your first line of defense in the event of a database tragedy. See my 8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others).
2. You can check Users should use the visual rich editor by default (this can be overridden on a per user basis in the Users panel), but note that the editor doesn’t work in Safari.
3. If you want your posts littered with emoticons, click the Convert emoticons checkbox.
4. Checking WordPress should correct invalidy nested XHTML automatically is a good idea, but note that some plugins may not work with this checked. Check it, but keep it in mind if you’re troubleshooting.
5. Select your most popular category from the Default post category popup.
6. If you want to post by email, follow the directions under Writing by e-mail. I can’t really think of a good reason to do this, though.
7. If your blog is new and you want to play around a bit before announcing it to the world, be sure to delete http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ from the Update Services field. Don’t forget to add it back when you’re ready to brag. Ping-o-Matic is all I use, but there are lots of Update Services.

See Writing Options SubPanel.

Reading Options

You’ll probably be fine with the defaults, but here are some things to consider:

1. You can display a given number of posts or days on your pages. If you’re going to display the entire post, rather than excerpts, you’ll probably want to pick a lower number. I use 10 posts per page.
2. I recommend publishing summaries in your feeds, but you still want to keep these settings here: show the most recent 25 posts and show full text. Use FeedBurner for your feeds, but set up a secret feed for backup purposes (see Strategy 8 in 8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others)).
3. Leave UTF-8 as the encoding for your pages and feeds.
4. If you don’t know what it means, don’t check WordPress should compress articles.

See Reading Options SubPanel.

Discussion Options

These are the global settings for comments. They can be overridden on an individual basis in the Write Post subpanel.

1. If you want to allow comments, check all three boxes Under Usual settings for an article. I recommend allowing comments, but if you don’t want comments, just uncheck Allow people to post comments on the article.
2. Under E-mail me whenever, check both boxes. It’s fun to know that someone has posted a comment on your blog, and even if you have the spam blocker Akismet installed, some spam will sneak through, requiring moderation.
3. If you have a problem with spam, check An administrator must approve the comment. If you’re a stickler for email addresses, check Comment author must fill out name and e-mail. I don’t check either of these boxes. But I do check Comment author must have a previously approved comment, which allows someone I’ve already moderated once to post without further moderation.
4. Under comment moderation, I hold comments even if they only contain one link.
5. You can add a list of words to identify spam or to be automatically blacklisted, but if you are going to moderate your comments, I wouldn’t bother with this.
6. Check Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies, which are often used for spamming. These messages will be deleted without warning.

See Discussion Options SubPanel.

Permalinks Options

There’s some controversy over which is the best permalink structure for your blog, and there are lots of tags available.

1. I don’t recommend using the default, but I don’t recommend getting fancy, either. I select Custom, specify below and type /%postname% in the Custom structure field. That yields a user-friendly (and search engine-friendly) URI like the one you see in your browser now.
2. Whatever you decide, make sure your .htaccess file is updated. If you get a message after clicking Update Permalink Structure that your .htaccess file is not writable, you’ll need to copy the information in the .htaccess field and paste it into the .htaccess file on your server. If you’re shaking your head in bewilderment, it might be easier to see Changing File Permissions.

See Permalinks Options SubPanel.

Miscellaneous Options

You’ll probably be fine with the defaults, but here are some things to consider:

1. If you want to upload files from the Write Post subpanel, such as images to embed in your entries, you can set the path to your uploads folder here. WordPress will create the default path for you the first time you upload a file from the Write Post subpanel (if the wp-content directory is writable). If you use this feature, it’s probably a good idea to check Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders.
2. You can leave Tack Links’ Update Times unchecked.
3. Unless you’re going to use some obscure hack, leave Use legacy my-hacks.php file support unchecked. Hacks have been replaced by plugins.

See Miscellaneous Options SubPanel.