April 12th, 2008

Blog Series - From Setup To ? - Part 3 - Steps Before Changing The Theme

written by Keith James Lock

OK, at this point you should have a WordPress Installation up and running. I covered the steps for downloading and installing WordPress in Part 2 of the series. Also, for those of you that host with GoDaddy and wanted to use the quick install method, Part 2a has the steps for quick-installing WordPress with GoDaddy. Since writing the installation posts, a new version of WordPress was introduced. From this post on we will be using version 2.5. Since the steps to install WordPress 2.5 are very similar to installing the previous version, having only a couple subtle differences, I decided not to rewrite the previous posts. If you have the previous version installed check out the upgrading Wordpress post before you continue. As always though, if you run into problems just ask and I'll do my best to help out.

The following things are what I do after installing a fresh copy of WordPress.

WordPress Settings

The settings menu is on the far right side of the screen after logging into the Wordpress admin panel. I always head over there first to make sure things are setup how I like them. In the General section, the Blog Title would have been created during setup. You can change it there if you wish or leave it the same. Also, replace "Just another WordPress weblog" with your own Tagline. Make any other changes that you see fit and Save.

From the Reading section I usually change just one quick thing. It's a matter of preference obviously but I like to show my full post at all times and not just a summary. Since the posts are often long, 10 (the default) is too many to show. I usually change it to 5 posts for my blog pages and leave it at 10 for the feeds.

Under Permalinks I like to change my blogs permalinks to something more search engine friendly. By default, the links to your posts are numerical which don't do them any justice. Changing the permalink structure to a custom one is a good idea. I usually add /%postname% to the custom box. Since I often use my posts as landing pages for PPC advertising I like to keep it short, and at the same time search engine friendly. There are differing opinions on what to change it to, but it is generally accepted that it definitely should be changed from the default to something else.

Cleaning Up

A new install of Wordpress has one post, one comment and some links in the blogroll. I always scrap that stuff right off the bat. You can get rid of the default comment by clicking the Comments menu, and click the Delete link under the Actions section next to the comment.

If you click the Manage menu you will be in the Posts section. Put a checkmark next to the post and click the Delete button. From the Links section, click the checkmark next to Name to fill all of the boxes next to the links with checkmarks then click the Delete button.

At this point you can also change the name of your default category. Every post that you create has to be put into a category. If you don't specify one (or more) it will go into the default category. Originally it is called "Uncategorized". Pick a name for a category that you will be using often and change it to that. Use "General" if you can't think of anything right now. To change it, click the Categories section, click on the name of the category and edit the values in Category Name and Category Slug. To understand better what some of these terms mean, grab the WordPress book or check out the WordPress.org site for more info.

An About page is created during the Wordpress install. You could edit the page now or later on. I wouldn't delete it, it's definitely good to have. To edit it, click the Pages section, click the name of the page, make your changes, click Save (on the right side).

Clean up is complete.

A couple more things I like to get out of the way right off the bat...

Create Section to Store Affiliate Link Redirect Files (to hide affiliate links)
Create Robots.txt File (block certain sections of site from search engines to avoid duplicate content penalties)

Check out the links above and complete those tasks if you feel like it. The next post will discuss finding and setting up a theme and then we'll get into installing some plugins.