Are you running a WordPress Blog? Here are three tips that will make your blog look more professional and also help your visitors become more engaged with you.
- Change your URLs to pretty permalinks. This means that instead of seeing example.com/p=23 you end up with something like example.com/my-cool-blogpost. This is important for a few reasons; it gives Google and other search engines a little more description about your post and it makes it easier to remember or search for.
- Don’t use “Admin” for your author name. WordPress gives you a number of options to use when posting to your blog, so that your post shows “posted by ____” where the blank represents your name. By default, your username will be displayed there, but you can change it to anything you want, you could use your First name, nickname or a different name if you prefer. This gives your readers a more personal experience that you can’t achieve with the generic “Admin” username.
- Sign up for Gravatar and display your profile picture. Most WordPress sites support Gravatar icons. If you sign up to Gravatar.com you can associate your email address with a picture of your choice. This image will show up whenever you leave a comment, and in some cases, depending on your theme it will also show up when you post a new blogpost. It is good to have this set when you start leaving comments so that people can recognize you whenever you leave a comment in your blog or even someone else’s.
To fix this, go to your Dashboard, then click on the Settings (lower left), and then go to Permalinks. Choose one of the permalink options that are available to you or read through the documentation to pick a custom one.
To fix this, go to your Dashboard, then click on Users (mid-lower left) and then click on “Your Profile” this will take you to a screen that looks like the picture below:
Where to change "display name as" in WordPress
To set this up, go to gravatar.com and sign up for an account, then upload your picture and you’ll be ready to go. You can see this working in any of the blogposts that have comments on my site.
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