Now that your theme is live and working, there will be a few quick things that you’ll want to do to get your site just the way you want it!

There is a lot more you can do with the PliablePress control panel, but we’ll cover just the essentials here.

1. Under PliablePress > Style, you can select the color scheme to use for your site (if you purchased a theme that comes with multiple color schemes).
2. In your WordPress dashboard, click the PliablePress link from the bottom left to load the control panel.
3. In the first tab (“General”), enter your FeedBurner feed address if you have one, and then further down, enter in the addresses of all your social media profiles (Twitter etc.), then save it.
4. If you would like to use a featured post slider on the homepage, go to the Homepage tab, then in the Featured Area Settings sections, set “Show Slider?” to Yes. Below that, choose to use either a Tag or a Category to pull posts from, and lastly, enter the name of the Tag or Category to use. Now save the options.
5. In the SEO tab, enter a Meta Description of your site, and further down the page, enter the Homepage title exactly as you would like it (The rest are fine to leave as they are, but these are so important for your SEO, it’s worth making sure they have all your keywords in place!). Again, make sure you save when you’re done.
6. The last tab will normally be titled with the name of your theme. The exact options here vary for each theme, but you should check out the Theme Specific links in the Support navigation on the right of this page for more help on what to enter.
7. In the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets. Widgets are the names given to each “section” in your sidebar. The available widgets will be listed as grey bars on the left. On the right, you will then see the available widget areas (e.g. “Full Width Sidebar” etc.). Make sure the arrow next to a widget area’s title is pointed down, so that you can edit it.To add a widget to your site, just hold your mouse button down on it and then drag it into place in one of the widget areas. A window with some options for that widget will then appear.

Optional – If you would like to use an expanded footer (i.e. display widget theres, like on this site), go to PliablePress > Footer, and then enable the expanded footer. Now go back to Appearance > Widgets and drag 3 widgets into the Footer section (Make sure you add exactly 3!)

Similarly, you can add a widget to your site’s header by going to PliablePress > Header, and then adding the widget via Appearance > Widgets.

Optional – If you use Google Analytics, you can paste your tracking code into the Google Analytics section of the Footer tab.

WordPress Best Practices

These are some tips related to setting up WordPress for the first time on your site. Just some simple things to save yourself a headache later on!

• Permalinks – In Settings > Permalinks, you should choose a permalink setting for your articles (So that they have nice web addresses). We recommend using the Month and Name option. We definitely do not recommend using the post’s category anywhere in the URL. That just leads to all sorts of issues in a year or two’s time.
• Install a Cache Plugin – WordPress (and PliablePress) work by saving information about your site to a database. When someone loads the page, it asks the database for the info it needs to build your page. A cache stores a copy of that page though so the next time someone comes, we don’t have to ask the database. It will speed up your site for visitors, and massively reduce the strain on your server, so it’s definitely worth doing! Two of the best are WP Super Cache (Easiest to install, and works great!) and W3 Total Cache (Harder to configure, but helps more with load times). You can only use one (but you can swap at any time).
• Choose “Content”, Not Excerpts – You won’t want to show full posts on your homepage because then the page is extremely hard to scan. There are two ways to choose what to show instead. The first is to write your post, then click where you want the cutoff point to be, then click the “More” button in the WordPress editor (Near the end of the top row of icons in your editor). The alternative is to enter what you want into the Excerpt box (or if you don’t, WordPress will chop the first 55 words of the post for you).

  PliablePress lets you choose to use either method. Just go to  PliablePress > Homepage. We highly recommend you use the Content method because it’s easier for you to use, gives you full control, and most of all, it means we can use the excerpt ourselves in other parts of the theme to display short snippets of your posts (e.g. in some of the featured post sliders, like Creative Soul’s).