Setting Your WordPress Site’s Name and Tagline

Now that you have had an overview of some of the things you can do with your WordPress website, it’s time to get into action.

As a starting point, let’s set the website’s name, which would appear at the top of the site. We will also set the tagline. The tagline is usually a short text that adorns the site’s name.

For example, have a look at this site’s name on the top left of this page – it is “Make A Website” and the tagline that you can see just below it is “Yourself, Like a Pro”.

Based on which installation script you used for installing WordPress, the site name and tagline could already have been set. For example, if you used Softaculous it asks you for your site name and description during installation and hence both of these reflect on your site the very first time you view it. SimpleScripts, on the other hand, just sets your site name and leaves the description to be the default ‘Just another WordPress blog’. Either way, let’s just set it newly so you know how it is done and can do it whenever you want to.

The following is an image of a fresh WordPress installation. Notice the title is ‘My Blog’ and the tagline is ‘My WordPress Blog’.

Setting the Header Text

We will now change it to something else. This is how: Go to the dashboard and find the option near the bottom of the Sidebar called ‘Settings’. Under Settings, find ‘General’ and click on it. Henceforth, I’ll represent these kind of actions using the notation Settings –> General.

On the right side, you’ll find Site Title. Set it to a new name. Here, for example, I set it to “Travelista” and the Tagline to “Tales from my travels”. These could, in my opinion, make a nice name and tagline if you were to start a travel blog (Travelista sounding like Fashionista). Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, travelista.com/net/org all are already taken. Anyway, the names just serve us fine for learning right now. So once you are done making the changes, scroll down and hit ‘Save Changes’. That’s it. Now refresh (or open) your site and you should see the changes in place, like the following.

Now, if you want to change the color of your header text and tagline, head over to Appearance -> Header in the Sidebar.

On the right, below Header Text you’ll find the option called Text Color. Click on the color to its right and it will blow up into a small color box. At the bottom of the color box are several colors. Choosing any one of them, other than black or white, brings a color pattern inside the box. Move the orb around inside the box to choose a color and shade.

If you choose either black or white in the colors at the bottom, this multi-color pattern will become a grey scaled one and you’d be able to choose from the various shades of grey, black and white as your text color. Once you find a color you like for your header, click on Save Changes. Again go to your site and load it afresh and you’ll see the header in the color you just chose.

Isn’t that easy? 🙂

In the next lesson, we’ll discuss pages and posts, both of which are the primary channels of content display on a WordPress website. And then in the lesson after that, we’ll go ahead and create our first post.

Note, however, that this isn’t the order in which you should do things when you are putting your actual site together. We are following this order so that you get a hang of the important concepts. And, also for a little instant gratification.

In actual practice, before starting to create content for a site, you’d do a few other things – like changing your themes, installing plugins and customizing permalinks and a few more. Only then should you start working on your site’s content. Right now, however, discussing these concepts can be confusing, so we’ll learn them as need arises while going through the various lessons.

Finally when you know everything that you need to know, we’ll reverse the changes we did in the process of learning and start afresh, the way we are supposed to. And of course, I cover the list of things that should be done immediately after installing WordPress, in a lesson of its own.

Next, let’s have a look at pages and posts: the two primary ways of adding content to your WordPress site.