How to start a website with WordPress,Digging Into WordPress

DON’T INSTALL WORDPRESS WITH A WIZARD/SHORTCUT/AUTOMATIC SERVICE.

Make sure you have the tools you’ll need

Buy a domain name (short, easy to remember, .com or .net), buy website hosting, TextWrangler is a free mac code editor in the computer lab, and FireFTP is a free firefox add-on.

Configure your domain name servers

You get this information from your website hosting service and then you edit your the DNS settings in your domain manager. Try to do this before you show up in the lab, because the changes you make “will take 24-48 hours to propagate throughout the Internet”. Don’t be afraid to call your domain name or website hosting provider for help, you’re paying for it.

Create a custom email account with Google Standard Apps

In order to promote your website you should use an email address that contains your domain name.

Get a gmail account, get a google Standard Apps account, and then access your Standard Apps account through gmail. I’ll try to do a screencast for this, but in case I don’t here’s a good screencast on how to get get Google Standard apps email setup.

The five minute WordPress install

Make sure you have ftp access (username/password) to your website hosting.

Create a MySQL database on your website host. Your database’s name, username, password, and host are different than your ftp username/password.

Installing WordPress. There are great video tutorials on how to install WordPress.

Publishing with WordPress

Click on Posts–>Add New. Write a title, and write something in the post body.

The visual what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) post editor is how you should write your post.

Hardcore html people write only with the html post editor, but don’t try to do that. You’ll use the html editor to embed video and images from YouTube and Flickr.

Permalinks

I highly recommend setting your permalinks to /%postname%/.

Categories and tags

I think that a lot of people overuse tags because they think tags are for SEO. Tags are more for navigational purposes. I wouldn’t recommend using tags at all.

Users and administrators

If you can convince your friends to write for you do it!

WordPress themes

We talked about this last class. I hope you spent some time learning how WordPress themes are designed.

WordPress plugins

We have the next couple of months to make your WordPress website a promotion management machine. Don’t feel like you have to install/configure all or any of these plugins all at once. The 15 WordPress plugins I use for drho.ro are Advanced Excerpt*, Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, Blubrry PowerPress*, Clean Notifications, Google Analytics for WordPress, Google XML Sitemaps, Pretty Link, Robots Meta, Sharecount for Facebook*, ShareThis*, SyntaxHighlighter Evolved*, TweetMeme Retweet Button*, Twitter Tools*, WP-DBManager. * = you probably don’t need.

Next class: how WordPress themes are organized.

Next lab: hacking your WordPress theme.

Get Ready for eBooks next year!