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General
Most of these settings should be self explanatory. This is where you name your blog, tell WordPress the URL of your main blog page, the Admin email address, set date and time formats to be used throughout the website, and more.
Always click “Save Changes” if you’ve changed any of the settings.
Two settings that are important to mention…
Membership – select this if you want to allow anyone to become a registered user. Uncheck this if you don’t want users or you plan to create all users manually.
New User Default Role – this determines what role a new user automatically becomes when they register. This is usually set to subscriber. Remember that you can assign new roles to each user on the Users page.
Note: I don’t know why they have this as a choice, but I don’t see why you would ever want all your users set as Administrators. That sounds like trouble. DON’T do that.
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_General_SubPanel
Writing (settings for creating and editing posts/pages)
Size of the Post Box – sets the default size of the text box in the Edit mode. Although it can be re-sized by dragging the diagonal lines in the bottom right of the box, you can change this setting so that it always starts at a comfortable size.
Default Post Category – from the drop-down menu choose the category you do the most writing in. This way all those posts will automatically be set to go in that category.
Remote Publishing – these settings allow you to use desktop software to add posts to your website.
Post via Email – these settings allow you to post to your website through your email program.
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Writing_SubPanel
Reading (settings for the live content)
Front Page Display – if your website is just a blog site, this setting will usually be set at “your latest posts” so your visitors see exactly that. The other option is to assign a static Page as your home page.
Blog Pages Show at Most – this sets how many posts to show at a time. If it is set at 10, you will see no more than ten posts at a time on any page.
Syndication Feeds Show the Most Recent – this sets how many RSS feeds (post titles) to be shown in a visitors’ RSS Feed Readers.
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_SubPanel
Discussion
Default Article Settings – the third box in this list controls whether or not you want to let visitors leave comments on your website. But you can override it per post/page if you wish.
Other Comment Settings – here you can control whether visitors are required to fill out their name and email, whether they need to be registered users, and whether to list all the comments for a post on one page or break it up (useful if you get over 20 comments per post).
Other settings here are about getting email notifications when someone leaves a comment and whether it needs an Administrator’s approval before being posted to the website.
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Discussion_SubPanel
Media Settings
Here you can set the size (by pixels) of the thumbnails that WordPress creates when you upload images. You can also set a maximum width for larger images so you don’t upload images that are too big to fit in your website’s design.
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Media_SubPanel
Privacy
This setting is only necessary if you wish to block search engines from “crawling” your website. This would be appropriate if your website has a more private function or isn’t finished being built.
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Privacy_SubPanel
Permalinks
Permalinks are what make your web page URLs legible by search engines as well as visitors. By default your pages’ URLs looks something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123
I use the “Month and Name” choice and so my URLs look like this: http://www.tenten71.com/blog/2009/09/know-your-web-browser/
As you can see the blog on my website is installed in a folder called “blog” and this particular post was posted in September of 2009 and has the permalink title of “know-your-web-browser” (which was created from the Permalink & Title options when I created the post).
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Permalinks_SubPanel
Miscellaneous
Find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Miscellaneous_SubPanel
