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Day 5 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

If you have decided to start a blog, and decided to use Wordpress as your blogging software, which I recommend then it is time for you to get set up with your wordpress site.  Luckily getting set up with wordpress is easy.  You can have a basic site up and running in 1/2 an hour, and be blogging 5 minutes after that.

Here are the steps that you will need to take to get going

1) Download Wordpress - Its a free download.  Go to that site, download it to your computer and unzip it and you are ready to proceed with the next step.

2) Installation - The next step is installing wordpress.  In order to install wordpress correctly you need to verify that your host has PHP and a mySQL database.  If you are using Godaddy as your host, then you need to make sure that you are on Linux host plan not Windows hosting.  The windows host plan uses ASP not PHP and will not work with Wordpress.

    2) Free Installation - Can’t get Wordpress going for you?  These guys will set up your blog for free within just a couple of days of e-mailing them.

3) Using Wordpress - Once you have wordpress installed you are well on your way to blogging.  To login go to yourblogaddress/wp-admin    Once you are there the interface is fairly intuitive, but we’ll walk you through what some of the things mean.

Your wordpress user interface will look like

What you can Do at each tab -

• Dashboard - Use the dashboard to get caught up on the latest activity in your blog.  You can quickly link to moderate new incoming comments, you can see recent blogs who have linked to you, and you can get caught up on some of the latest wordpress news.
• Write - This is pretty intuitive.  You can use this to write your posts or your pages.  It has some options like Post Excerpt - where you can write an excerpt that will appear in Google and other places, Post Slug - where you can give each post a unique path if you don’t want it to default.  Post TimeStamp - Where you can edit the time that you want a post to go up on your blog if you want to delay posting it. (which is a really good idea)   Categories - Where you can define what categories the post is grouped with.   There are many other options in the write page, but those are the most important
• Manage - Manage will be a clutch tab that you use all the time.  It allows you to search for and manage your posts and pages.  It lets you handle your uploads and categories.   If you install plugins like Wordpress Database backup you will manage your automated backups from here as well.
• Comments - From here you can allow comments, edit them, delete them and view all the comments on your site.  You will want to use this frequently to make sure you are interacting with your readers
• Blogroll - Have some blogs that you really like?  Do you have another page of your own you want to give some link love to?  Use the blogroll and the links will appear on every page of your site.
• Presentation - If you get sick of the default wordpress theme (and you will quickly) you can go here to switch between other themes that you have uploaded.  You can quickly switch between several different themes to find the ones that you like.  You can get some free themes here.
• Plugins - Plugins are one of the things which make wordpress great.   By using just a couple of the Best Plugins, you can vastly increase the functionality of wordpress.  You can make it easier to catch comment spam, get backlinks, and refer visitors to other parts of your site.
• Users - You can define other people who can log into your site and what their access level is.  You can limit people to only being able to read the site and make comments, being able to write posts, being able to edit and moderate the site, and to having full control   You probably want to keep the number of people who have full control of your site to a minimum.
• Options - A few random options like your tag line and the address of your blog.  You will want to go here as soon as you set up your blog and make sure everything is correct.

Something that you should do immediately upon setting up wordpress is get Pretty Permalinks  going.  It is very ugly having a ? in your file path.  Set up pretty permalinks so that you can have permanent path to each of your posts.   Search engines prefer this for their rankings.