You should take some time to read the WordPress documentation and spend some time browsing your admin area to familiarize yourself with how WordPress works for you. Assuming that you have administrative privledges, log into your site: Dashboard > Settings > General and change the tag line – “just another word press site”- to whatever you like.
http://codex.wordpress.org/images/6/61/options-general.png
Some links to information that might be good reading and helpful.
Getting Started with WordPress
Working with WordPress
You can also find information about turning off comments site-wide, or on a per page/post basis in that information.
The site’s subtitle is changed in Dashboard -> Settings -> General -> Tagline.
I don’t know of any global option you can set to accomplish your second request, so removing the comment options for pages has to be done by unchecking the 2 comment-related boxes on the edit page for each of your pages. Alternatively you can edit the page.php
file in your theme and remove/comment out the code that puts comments there.
@hedronist
I don’t know of any global option you can set to accomplish your second request,
http://codex.wordpress.org/images/5/55/options-discussion1.png
Dashboard > Settings > Discussion > “Allow people to post comments on new articles”
Just turn it off. It can still be overridden on individual posts.
However, you are correct in assuming that if jenbaers request is to remove comment traces from the theme itself, rather than just turning off the ability to comment, it will have to be done by editing the theme files.
@cj: Thanks for the link. I’m new to WP (but not the web) and sometimes miss the obvious. I spent a fair amount of time looking for that sucker and damned if they didn’t put it in the Discussion section. Sheesh!