Changing the Admin User

By default when you first create a WordPress installation a single user is created for you called admin so that you can login. This user has full privileges for the site but it has the name of admin.

However if you create posts whilst logged in as the admin user they will show up with ‘admin’ as the author and this is undesirable if you wish to promote a personal or business brand with your blog.

Of course you need to use an account that has full privileges but you also want the account to have your chosen name. I achieve this aim simply by editing the ‘admin’ user. All the rights are the same but I just change the name associated with the account.

To edit users from your dashboard go to ‘Users’ and then click the username ‘admin’. This allows you to input the first name, last name, email address and some other details. Once you have entered the name make sure you also click the drop down ‘Display name publicly as’ and select your name, rather than admin.

Also, for security purposes change the generated password to something more secure and then save the user.

Setting up Comment Moderation

Comments are a crucial part of most blogs and as your blog grows and develops it will attract more and more comments – including a healthy dose of spam comments! We need to modify some settings so from your WordPress dashboard click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’.

Recent WordPress releases have changed this section a little but it should still basically be the same. Take a look at the following options:

Make sure that people are allowed to comment and allow to leave trackbacks. If these are turned off you can’t get comments on your blog.

Check the email options. Personally I switch off email notification as I check my blog comments daily so I don’t need to be emailed whenever somebody has left a comment but this may be useful if you don’t post very often or have a usually quiet blog.

By default, when somebody leaves a comment it is published immediately and of course that can be good or bad depending on your point of view. If somebody posts something abusive or spammy then you might want to know about it beforehand and this is largely dependent on the topic of your blog.

WordPress comes installed with the akismet plugin which will trap about 99% of spam so the vast majority of comments that get through will be from legitimate users and I find that most people do leave genuine comments which are no problem so I prefer not to moderate too much. The only thing I find to be an occasional problem is people leaving lots of links in a signature or something so I moderate all comments with 2 or more links.

When this happens you need to manually click the ‘approve’ button for every comment in the moderation queue before it will show up on your blog. This obviously causes a delay for the comment poster so I would advise you to use this feature sparingly.

Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since 2007 which earns a 4-figure monthly income. She shows you how to make money blogging and provides free downloads of her free guides & courses.