WordPress, How Tos

How to set up WordPress is something I will leave to the experts at WordPress. But there are a few things I do immediately after setting up WordPress, before I make any posts or even change the theme.

• The very first thing I do is go to Users –> Authors & Users (default tab) and click “edit” for my new admin profile….and CHANGE THE PASSWORD. I will never remember the random one WordPress gives me. (If you installed WordPress with Fantastico, you chose your own password, so you can skip this step.)
• Next, I set privacy settings in Options –> Privacy. If I have a lot of set up to do and don’t want visitors yet, I will opt for a private blog for now. This prevents WordPress from pinging Update Services every time I make a test post.
• Another important step before you start posting is your Permalinks options (Options –> Permalinks). I prefer “pretty permalinks” and so do search engines. They look nicer, are more memorable to users, and can tell the search engines more about the content of your site than a link with ?p=4 in it. Be sure you have a file in your root (top level) WordPress directory (same place as index.php) named .htaccess (it can be completely blank, but it must exist) which is CHMOD 666, so that WordPress can update the file for you.
• If this site will allow comments, I enable the Akismet plugin to prevent comment spam. You’d be amazed at how fast spammers find new installations of WordPress and start spamming them.

Once these preliminary set up steps are completed, I install the theme, start adding plugins and making test posts. The plugins usually lead to theme modifications, so now the real fun begins.

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