Jane Sheeba

Successful business & life - have them both!

How to change title, tagline and date format in WordPress?

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In this blog post let’s see how you can change the tile, tag line and date of your WordPress website.

When you have just installed WordPress, everything in the website is by the default WP setting and you need to edit it according to what you want.

The title and tag line as well as the time are very crucial things in a blog as these are the first things that readers see.

When you’ve installed WordPress, there is some default generic title and tag line for your website and a date and time that might not match yours. Let’s see how we can edit these.

The steps involved

The process is extremely easy and you’ll face no difficulties in doing it.

  • Firstly you have to log in to your account and go to the dashboard. On the left hand side of your dashboard you will find a list and one item there is General.
  • So you have to click on general and a window will come up with boxes like site title and site tag line, etc.
  • You will see by default WordPress has filled in My Blog and WordPress Blog on the title and tag line boxes.
  • So you have to click on the boxes and then change it to the title and tag line which you want for your website. The tag line should be something attractive, your unique value proposition, which will attract readers. You must think about these before you go about making technical setting changes in your blog.
  • When that is done you need to scroll down and you will find a box titled time zone. That box will already have a default time and date which might not coincide yours. You must click on the drop down and change it to your time zone. This is important because the time zone is required in both the backend and frontend of your blog. For example, when you create a new blog post, you have the option of publishing it immediately or you can set a time and date for later. This time and date will be according to the time zone that is set by you now.
  • You also have the option of displaying the time and date when you have published a blog at the end of your blog post. Even in the comments, the time and date displayed depends upon the one that you are setting up now. So it’s important that you alter the default time.
  • You can also choose a format and that is the format which will be displayed everywhere in your blog, both back and front end.

You can have a blog without changing its title or tag line or time zone.

However, it will be really awkward for a reader who has come to visit your blog to see generic names like My Blog and WordPress blog on your website instead of a personalized tag line and title.

In order to make your blog personal and attractive you must make these changes.

How to properly create category pages for your WordPress blog [Video]

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In this post, let’s see how to create categories for your blog or website.

So, it’s a really good idea to have categories in your blog. Categories are really important, because they lend a sense of organization to your blog and also they make your blog search engine friendly.

If you’ve categories you really get the lead on to what to write about.

We bloggers are often confused about what we should write in our blog, so once you have categories you know what the things you should focus on are.

Now it is not that you can’t have a blog if you don’t add categories, you can publish a blog without categories.

However, having categories means that it is easier for search engines and other people on the internet to understand about the content of your blog.

Else it can be really confusing to understand at a glance what you are writing about. Create around five to eight categories before you start writing any content in your blog.

Five to eight is not too less or not too many, it is the optimum number of categories to start with. Once you’ve made a list of categories, it’s time to create them in your WordPress website.

Watch the video below to see how to do it:

Video Transcript
Hi this is Jane and in this short video I’m going to show you how to create category pages for your website, for your blog. And, before going into the details of how to do it, let me talk briefly about the role played by categories in your blog. I mean, categories are a really crucial part of any blog. And they help you with two things, they help you with creating search engine focused content for your blog, having categories means you know what to write about, what topics you need to focus on and so forth. And it helps structuring your site content. So it’s quite nicely optimized for search engine.

You can ask, “Can I not publish any content on my site without categories, without creating categories?”, of course you can, nobody’s gonna stop you if you want to publish a blog post without a category on it. But the thing is that you will confuse both search engine and people and both of them will have a hard time understanding what your blog is all about. So before, creating your content plan, before writing your blog post, writing any piece of content I would suggest you to sit down and write five to eight categories for your blog. Personally I find five to eight to be the sweet spot as too little can make your blog too small so you will run out of ideas over the time.

And if you’ve too many categories then that will cause lack of focus. And, people will be really confused as to knowing what your blog is really about. So once you’ve selected the categories, now it’s time for you to create those category pages on your blog. And in this video I’m going to show you how to do that. And I here assume that you’ve already logged into your WordPress dashboard, all you have to do is hover your mouse over posts, and you will see something called categories. Just go ahead and click on it. So once there you will have the option to add a new category.

So I’m just going to create a category called blogging tips, on this blog and I have to fill up the slug- I chose the slug as blogging-tips so if blogging tips, I mean if the category name you choose for your that particular category is going to be a key word then using that particular name as your slug will make your URL search engine friendly okay. So if blogging-tips is a category in your niche, I’m sorry if blogging-tips is a keyword in your niche, and having the URL yoursite.com/blogging-tips will make that URL search engine friendly. Okay so, and then you can choose a parent I’ll show you in the next step how to do that. And you have to write a description for the category.

Now whether the description will be displayed on the category page or not depends highly on the theme you use. Some themes you can see the notification here, by WordPress. Some themes show the category in the category page, and some themes don’t show it. So it really depends on which theme you use. But in any case, you’re going to have a description for any category. This is helpful for both search engines and people to know what really that category is about. So now if you click on add new category button, the category will be created here, you can see it on the list here. And this count shows the number of blog post published in this category. So over the time as you publish blog post on this category you can see the count go up.

Now I’m going to show you how to choose a parent, I’m going to create another category called content marketing, fill up the slug, and I can choose blogging tips to be the parent of this category. Now if I add new category I can see that this content marketing category is a sub category of blogging tips. So this is how it works, so, once you have your list of categories, all you’ve got to do is, put in the name, slug, choose a parent if you want or just leave it as such. Fill in a new description and click on add new category.

Now if you have a SEO plug in like, WordPress SEO you will have a few more options in the edit page. So if you go and click edit, here I don’t have that but if you have that you’ll have some additional Meta description, SEO details, for this category page. I highly recommend you fill out those boxes as well if you have, I won’t say if you have, I strongly suggest you install plug in and optimize your category pages for search engine as well. Just add Meta descriptions and the title pages for your category pages as well.

So now I assume you’ve created a list of categories, go about using them in your blog post. If you want to create a new blog post, you will just have to go to post and add new and you will see the categories you created on the right side under the categories tab. So now you can click on any category, you can choose multiple categories, for your blog post and publish any blog post under a category. So this makes things really neat and organized when it comes to having a content cat on your website, on your blog. This helps both people and search engines to know what your site is about and really helps with search engine optimization I would say. So I hope this video helped. Until next time, this is Jane. Bye.

How to create category pages correctly on your WordPress blog?

  • Firstly you have to log in to your WordPress account and go to the dashboard.
  • In the dashboard on the left side there will be a list, one of the items in the list will be posts, so you will have to place your cursor there and a list of options will come where you can choose categories.
  • Here you can create your categories.
  • You will find a box for putting the category name, say blogging-tips, a slug, and a box called parent and one called description.
  • Now, if the name you are choosing for your category is a keyword then you must type it in the slug box. This will make your blog search engine optimized.
  • Having a URL like yoursite.com/blogging-tips really helps search engines to track down your blog.
  • Next you must fill in the description box. Filling in a description is really important as it helps search engine optimization and makes it easy for people to find and know about your blog. If you’re wondering if the description will show up in the blog page, it really depends on your theme. Some themes display it and some don’t.
  • So after this if you click on create category, your category will be created. In the right panel you can see your category and the number of posts under it. As you keep writing posts under it, the count goes up.

Creating a Parent category

For this you will have to create another category say Content Marketing. Fill in the slug, description, like before.

After you are done, here you have to choose another category as the parent of his category (watch video above if you have doubts).

So say make Blogging-tips the parent of this category. On the right hand you will see that the parent has been created.

Advanced options

Some people have SEO options in their WordPress which allows them to edit a few more things to optimize their categories for the search engines  – depends on whether you are using a SEO plugin or a theme (like Genesis themes) that has this feature..

Now if you have that, just click on edit beside the respective category, a window will open up with boxes like Meta description, SEO details, etc.

It is advisable that you fill out these boxes so that search engines and people can easily come to your blog.

After you have created five to eight categories for your blog, you can start using them.

In order to create a new post, click on posts and then new post. On the right side you will see the categories that you’ve created listed.

You can put your post into one or more categories and publish it.

Having categories makes things really clean and simple in your blog.

Further it helps search engines and people to know about your blog and visit your blog. Therefore having categories are really important for a blog.