At PhotoHow2 I’ve published a number of tutorials showing photographers how to set up an online portfolio using WordPress, but what if you’re site has morphed into something more–a business or a blog–and now you’re at the point where adding users to your site makes sense?  It could be time to add users.

There a scores of reasons for adding a user to your WordPress blog or website.  Have you been trying to provide content to your blog on a daily basis and the workload is starting to drag you down?  It might be time to add an author (an author can edit, publish and delete their own posts, as well as upload files and images) or a contributor (basically the same as an author, but they don’t have the ability to publish their own works, and, once a contributor’s post is approved by an administrator and published, the contributor can no longer access or edit that post).

Maybe its time to add a partner to your website development venture.  As far as WordPress users go, an editor would be a partner, and could publish, edit, and delete posts and pages, moderate comments, manage categories, manage tags, manage links and upload files or images.

[warning]Warning: be careful when adding a new Administrator user to your blog. Other Administrators are effectively co-owners. They have as much power over your blog as you do, including the ability to permanently delete it.[/warning]

If you’re stuck or your website needs repair, you might want to add an administrator who can fix the problem.  But be careful–a new administrator will be granted complete ownership of a blog, and can change anything that they want. Administrators can change the status of posts, pages, comments, settings, themes, imports, and users.  WordPress recommends that each website only grant administrative access to one user, but you might consider allowing a second administrator to access your site if you, for instance, have hired a website developer to make changes.

For more information on how to set up users on your WordPress website, visit these support pages: Adding Users and User Roles.  If you’ve got a ton of users and you’re looking for a way to control them, try on of these WordPress role and access control plugins.