The Geeky Guide to WordPress – The Beginning

As I’ve been doing this blogging thing a little while now and it seemed a good idea to pass on a few of the things that I’ve learned over the five years that I’ve been doing this. In easy and often geeky steps you’ll be taken through the steps and point out the pitfalls of taking your blog seed and growing it into something really amazing.

 

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The Start

Let’s say for argument’s sake you’re starting on a free wordpress.com site domain. YOu’ve taken the bold step of registering your site name after much searching through names and you’re here. You have these options.

Naturally the first thing you want to do is make the blog / site look and feel how you want it to. So where it says themes, hit Customise.

You’re then presented with this, loads of different and wonderful templates to make your blog look the way you want. Naturally the best ones cost so if you want pick one of those and pay or in the top right there’s options to filter and you can view only the ones that come for free.

The next bit is down to you, select the one that you think releases your creative blogger in the way you want. Follow the instructions, and if needs be keep changing until you’re happy.

If you’re not back onto your ‘my Sites’ page hit that button in the top left and then scroll down to settings.

 

 

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Setting up

This is the basic set up for the blog that you want. You don’t have to do it like I have if you don’t understand anything use Dr Google to help. There’s loads of Web help for WordPress and if you get really stuck Automattic’s Happiness Engineers really do try to make you happy by getting you going, it just might take a day or so for them to answer your question in the forums.

Here is easy. Get a goofy picture and upload it for your profile, set a site tagline which will describe your blog to all that find it in the blogosphere and set the title. With the title it’s important NOT  to use the web address of the site, many have done this and it seems to screw with things so that people can’t get to your site. This is a name only and can be anything.

 

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In the writing tab are all the settings for writing your blog posts. Most of what’s set in here is fairly self explanatory and it’s each to their own preference. What is worth noting is that Categories and Tags can be entered here.

I got really confused on what these were for when I first started blogging but Categories help the blogger organise their posts, a default category can be set and as many can be set up as desired. The best way to think of categories is to treat them as drop down menu’s on your blog site. So keep the number to a minimum and make them relate to your site becasue later when we get to site customisation these can be used to help with menu’s and organisation.

So that leaves Tags, these are used for readers and bloggers to help them find your content. So if you’re posting on how to set up a WordPress blog then tags like WordPress and Blog and Setup or Starting out might be a good place to start. Both Categories and tags can be added while writing blog posts but if there’s an organised plan to your blog site then this is the time to start.

 

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The discussion tab is a load of settings on how interaction is meant to work between yourself and other bloggers. It should be straightforward and I think this is pretty much the default setup. Basically go nuts and do it how you want it!

 

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Lastly there’s the Traffic tab, I’m not going to say much here as it’s all fairly well set up anyway. The Google site indexing and all that I haven’t shown becasue this is more complex stuff to cover later.

What the blog needs now is content.

So get writing!

Planet Simon

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