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If you are new to WordPress or would like some tips on some things you might want to do or think about next, then read on. For our customers, we will have taken care of some of the points for you, which are marked.

1. Change the Admin password (COMPLETED)

During the install of WordPress you are issued a generated password, which if you haven’t changed yet you may wish to in case you lose the welcome email and block yourself from the admin section. Remember to make your password stronger with lower and upper case letters, numbers and allowed symbols.

2. Activate the Akismet plugin

Your standard WordPress install comes with a dormant plugin named Akismet, which is great in the fight against spam and will help protect you. It also gives you statistics on its success, so you can marvel at the number of comments you no longer have to mark as spam.

1. Go to the Plugins page in the WP admin area and activate the Akismet plugin
2. To complete the Akismet activation you will need an API key. You can get this by registering on WordPress.com, then viewing your profile.
3. Now go to Plugins > Akismet Configuration, and paste in your key.

3. Activate a Permalink structure (COMPLETED)

Your posts will by default look similar to www.mysite.com/?p=123, which doesn’t give much away to the search engines. To improve things, you can use the powerful Permalink structure option found under: Settings > Permalinks.

You might want to go for something such as /%category%/%postname%/. Once set-up, the next two points can really come into play.

4. Strategise your Category and Tag setup (COMPLETED)

While this area is particurlarly complex and requires a post on its own, the basic point that starting out with a clear view to what you want to get from your blog is key. Mass structure changes later on are always possible, but are more likely to be complex and time consuming.

It is also worth noting that with a standard template showing Categories and Tags, WordPress will ‘create’ a new page for each Category and Tag. While adding a 100 categories throughout your posts might seem like you have your bases covered, you may dilute your position that none rank well, whereas carefully selecting core areas to target with SEO might yeild better visitor numbers.

5. Take care with your titles

While the title element of each of your posts carrying a lot of SEO value, its worth thinking hard on who you are writing the article for and what keywords they might use to look for the valuable content you offer.

6. Add a tracking code (COMPLETED)

Now you have your blog up and running, you want to install a tracking code to monitor your visitor statistics. We recommend Google Analytics, which is free, looks good and very powerful. While there are plugins in to do so, you can also add it manually to the footer.php file in your template folder (i.e. /wp-content/themes/x/footer.php).

7. Personalise

When you reply to comments on your blog, you have a little Avatar that appears beside your entry. You can use Gravatar to create a Globally recognized Avatar that is twinned with your email address. This will then appear on your own site, but also any others to which you sign up with that email. Depending on your blog style you could include a photo of you or perhaps your logo for the corporate touch.

8. Back up your data

As a rule, if losing it will ruin your day/week/life then backup! With the wonderful WordPress, a plugin exists for you – WP-DB-backup. Not only can it backup your data, it can run on a schedule and email the backup to you periodically.

Do bear in mind, that backing up the tables does not backup the files, such as uploaded images, music and video, all of which can be done via FTP or additional plugins.

9. XML Sitemap

Help the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com) to find and browse your site with a sitemap. There is a great plugin named Google XML Sitemaps to help you on your way.

10. Post regularly

If you use your WordPress as a blog, posts are typically marked with a post date. It can therefore be very obvious after a few seconds on a blog, whether the content is updated often or has been sat still for the last 6 months. If you are looking to capitalise and perhaps grow a following, then regular and good quality content is a must.

About us

We are a web design and development company in Canterbury, Kent and have a wealth of experience designing and developing with WordPress. If you have a project you would like to talk through, then please get in touch via our contact page.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under Web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 10 Things to do after installing the wonderful WordPress

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