With WordPress installed on your website, it’s time to get your blog running and looking professional! All you’ll need to do is:

1. Select a Theme
2. Add Posts
3. Add Pages
4. Add Plugins
5. Add Widgets

1. Select a Theme

 

This is one of the most exciting parts – choosing how your site is going to look and function.  Keep this in mind when choosing your theme:

• Does it fit the purpose and content of your site?  For example, personal websites are going to look different to business websites.
• Is it easy on the eye and easy to read?
• Is it easy to navigate through the menus?
• Don’t worry too much about colours – they should be customizable, however the colour schemes need to complement each other.  For example, can you easily distinguish headers and links from normal text?
• Is this something you’re going to feel proud of when you look at it and share with your friends and customers?
• Does it allow widgets?  This makes customizing an important section of your site easier.

With WordPress 3.0, it’s easier than ever to install themes.  Simply login to your admin console and on your left menu, select Appearance -> Themes. Click on the “Install Themes” tab and you’ll get the options below.

How cool is that?  You can search for themes according to your preferences – how many columns, what colours, and what parts are customizable.  Not only that, you can preview them as well!  If it’s an established theme, it’s worth checking out the reviews – check out the details to see how others have rated them and how many times they’ve been downloaded.  Obviously ones that have been downloaded a lot will stand a greater chance for other sites to look similar to yours.

If you want to check out even MORE themes, Smashing Magazine has 100 free wordpress themes to choose from that look fantastic.

Posts -vs- Pages

You can write either posts or pages.  Posts will fall under your blog entries and appear in reverse chronological order and appear on your blog’s home page.  Pages, are for more static content that will appear outside the blog page in your menu.  Pages form an important part of how your structure your content.

Whether you are writing for blog posts or pages, the content principles are the same:

• Write with your target audience in mind, and keep things relevant, useful, and thought-provoking.
• Apply these content guidelines – use headers, bullet points, bold and italics tags to break up your paragraphs.  Note that H1 (or Heading 1) tags which will most likely be your page/post titles, have strong weightings to let the search engines know what the page/post is about.  Make sure you include some keywords in your H1 tags, with the closer to the start of the sentence, the more weighting you will receive!

2. Posts

 

These are your blog posts and will automatically display on your blog page.  Aim to write at least once a fortnight to keep your site fresh and visitors coming back.  Aim for more recent content with your posts as these will typically involve more interaction with your visitors, which is what you want.

To start posting:

1. Go to “Posts” on the right menu and click on “Add New”
2. Enter your post title and be sure to create categories to organise your posts, as well as enter tags to describe your post.  These help you manage your content and help your audience to know what your posts are about.
3. Write away!  You can save drafts, preview posts, add images/video, etc.
4. Make sure you enable comments on your blog posts, to encourage interaction with your visitors.

3. Pages

 

Pages will likely contain content that is more static and timeless, for example “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Testimonials” pages.

Add new pages by going to “Pages” on the right menu.  You can create sub-pages underneath other pages, and specify the order that they will appear in the menu.

If you prefer, you can make a “Home” page and make this your home page instead of your blog page, which is your home page by default.  To do this, simply:

1. Create your “Home” page
2. Create an empty “Blog” page
3. Go to “Settings” -> “Reading Settings” and change your front page display setting to a static page, and set your front page to your “Home” page, and your posts page to your “Blog” page, like below:

4. Plugins

 

Plug-ins are one of the greatest things since sliced bread! You can leverage off the brilliant work of many other developers out there so you can focus on things you know best. Did I also mention, that most of them are FREE?!?! They are so easy to install in just a few clicks.

To install, go to your left menu and click on “Plugins” -> “Add New” and search for ANYTHING you want.

A few examples of plug-ins to whet your appetite:

• Sociable – allow people to share your posts through Social Media like Twitter, Facebook, Digg.
• Contact Form 7 – Customers contact you and their details are stored in your WordPress database.
• NextGEN Gallery – show off your own Image Gallery with a slideshow option

5. Widgets

 

Widgets are basically like plug-ins, but built in a way so you can put arrange them in your sidebar and configure them without coding.  For example, on my sidebar you can see my “Sign up” widget, and all the others like “Recent Posts”, “Categories”, etc.

Check out your widgets available by going to “Appearance” -> “Widgets” and look at the options you have available to drag into your sidebar.  Please note most themes should have widget functionality.

In your sidebar, it is important to also include a call-to-action (if you don’t have it anywhere else), whether it’s an:

• RSS icon to allow people to subscribe to your latest posts
• Contact form
• Opt-in form to sign up for exclusive specials, free gifts, newsletters, or e-books

This is what you ultimately want your visitors to do on your site – the main goal of your site.  I recommend at the very least building a customer e-mail database.

WordPress Benefits

Just a few of the WordPress benefits are:

• As you add new pages and posts, the links are automatically generated (but can be changed) and are SEO friendly!  Include keywords in your page and post titles where applicable, but don’t just include them for the sake of it
• Your menu navigation is updated automatically as you add new pages
• Your blog posts are automatically added to your blog’s home page
• You don’t need to know how to code and can leverage off the themes and plug-ins developed by others (Big $$$ savings)

And that’s it! Your website is up and running and a huge congratulations to you!

But that’s only the beginning!  There is so much more that you can do with your website, in terms of functionality, and drawing many more visitors to your site.  Stay posted for more, and contact us for a free SEO review.