WP setup

While WordPress is a widely popular and powerful website building cms it can be daunting to install and learn how to use especially for a first time user that has little web design experience so here is a short tutorial to provide installation and setup help for WordPress.

WordPress is a CMS (Content management system) generally used for blogging but robust enough to manage most any type of website so you would expect installation to be complicated however it is really very simple.  The WP website offers a handy five minute installation tutorial that explains the initial setup steps so I won’t spend anytime explaining that process.  I would however suggest that if you don’t understand the first few lines of the install process you should just submit a ticket to your host and ask them to install it for you as most hosts will take care of it quickly and easily for you. 

Once the initial WordPress script is installed you are faced with a dashboard, menu sidebar and tons of options which is where it might become confusing for a first time user.  My first steps tweak some settings and setup the script to make it work best for a seo website.  One quick thing to setup is the ‘permalinks’ option located under the ‘settings’ menu.  The default setting creates your website links using numeric values that do not provide any search engine benefits so I suggest you use the ‘custom structure’ option with some tags such as /%postname%/%post_id%/%categories%/ which the script will replace with text that might help search engines to determine your pages/posts content and provide better rankings.  To alter this setting you may need to set your .htaccess file permission to 777 so that the script can write to it, or you can do it manually and upload the file via ftp.

Another setting to change is under ‘General’ which is the ‘tagline’ option that appears under your site title on all the pages, you really want to use that prime spot at the top of your website to create some search engine friendly text. 

The ‘Discussion’ menu option contains a number of options you might want to alter depending on if you want to recieve emails when users comment or register though you should be aware many spammers use blog comments so you will get a great deal of spam if you aren’t careful and monitor them.

The other big menu options to explore are the ‘Appearance’ menu and the ‘Plugins’ menu.  The appearance menu contains your ‘theme’ opitions which you can use to change the layout and structure of the WordPress website with no real coding on your part.  I would suggest using only paid premium theme’s or ones that have been approved and vetted by wordpress as people have been known to offer free themes that contain hidden link codes and spam that you might not notice but could negatively affect your website or visitors.  Also the ‘Plugin’ menu lets you install a huge variety of plugins that can expand the utility of your WordPress script, again be careful that the plugins you install are legitimate and preferrably updated regularly.  Generally the most popular plugins are safe and obviously useful since thousands of people have been using them. 

Finally your initial Word Press install created a basic post, page, and comment as well as links in the blog roll.  You can use these as examples to learn from but I would suggest altering or deleting them as soon as possible because they provide no other use.  Lastly WordPress creates a ‘Powered by WordPress’ link at the bottom of your website which you can remove by editing the footer.php file you can find under ‘Appearance’ > ‘Editor’ menu though if you use a custome theme the link may already be removed.  Either way leaving that link creates the possibility hackers or others can scan the internet and find all the wordpress blogs easily which could lead to problems for you, besides nobody needs to know what CMS you are using as long as your website works and looks good!