I love Word Press. It’s hands down the best blogging software you can get. (If you disagree, get your own website.)
It can handle anything from blogging, through to ecommerce Whatever you want to do, there’s a plugin for it!
This article will talk you through the basic steps I do after the initial installation dust has settled.
Word Press is great. It’s incredibly quick and easy to get a site up and running. If you host with GoDaddy, they’ll even do the install for you. All you have to do is setup the Admin account and choose a password.
I’ve installed a ton of WP sites over the years and there’s certain things that I now tweak before I even start thinking about content or themes. This is a brain dump of the steps I’ve built up over the years to create my basic WP site setup.
So, we’ll take it that you’ve managed to install Word Press on your site. If you do have any problems, check out the piss simple help files over at Word Press.
OK, you have your site, it’s installed ok and you’ve managed to login to the Dashboard – www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin
Right off the bat, you want to activate the Akismet plugin (Plugins – Akismet – Activate). Get yourself an akismet code and copy & paste it into the required box.
Save and you’re done. Akismet handles a LOT of the spam and other crap your site is going to attract. So, you want it turned on and you want it on right now.
Next up, permalinks. I cannot stress this enough, you want to change this before you add any content or pages. Think of the permalinks as the hard coded URL to your posts & pages. You want this to be as straight forward as possible. The more “normal speak” contained in the URL, the better it is for SEO and rankings.
Click on Settings – Permalinks – Then select “Custom Setting” and add “/%category%/%postname%” – without the ” ” marks. Click Save.
OK, we’re doing well. While we’re in the Settings menu, select General and setup the site as you see fit.
Change the name, the Tagline and Email addresses to your own settings.
Lovely, we’re nearly there. Now, we’re going to install a few Plugins that I’ve always found useful.
First up is “Contact Form 7″ – Without a doubt this is the best online Word Press form generator.
To install, click on Plugins from the menu on the left of the screen.
Click on Add New at the top of the screen.
Then search for the required plugin – it this case “Contact Form 7″ and install.
Once installed, click Activate and follow the on screen instructions on how to manage.
Now you want to install Google Monthly XML, Optimized D and WP CSS.
Once installed, active them all and turn on all the Recommended settings.
You will also want to install a backup plugin, so you don’t have problems if you lose all your content but I’ll take about that in more depth in another article. Bet you can’t WAIT!
So there you go, that’s how I get the Word Press install tweaked and ready for content.
There is of course a ton of other tweaks you can do to refine the site, but the above should point you in the right direction.
Next time we’ll talk about Themes and how you can select the perfect one for you.