BlogPress 101 » Initial Setup

Word Press Plugins

Hub McNett — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:22:06 +0000

After deciding on the theme you have selected, one of the most important things that you have to decide on is what plugins you are going to need on your blog or website. Remembering that not all plugins will work with the version of WordPress you are using, check them out first and be sure that it does everything that you want it to do. If not, move on and find another one that will work for you. http://wordpress.org, to me, is the best place to look for what you want. My rule of thumb is if you don’t really need it don’t install it.

Here is what I would call the startup plugins that will help you do your job:

Contact Form 7
This plugin can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Google Analyticator
This plugin adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
WordPress.com Stats
There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.
Jetpack by WordPress.com
This is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.
Dean’s FCKEditor For WordPress
This plugin Replaces the default WordPress editor and has lots of icons to help you write a post.

To wrap this up just remember these are plugins, with the exception of Contact Form 7, that run in the admin area of your WordPress blog. There are a lot of plugins that can make your blog display the information like you want it and get the most bang for your buck. Just DON"T go overboard with them.

Picking The Right Theme

Hub McNett — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:34:31 +0000

I have looked at hundreds of themes with all sorts of options and gizmos attached to them. What I have finally come up with is no two blogs need the same type of theme.

First you must decide what you want to do with your blog and next how much work do you want to put into it. Some of the themes are very easy to setup. Just install and start posting. Others get a little more involved. Some of them allow you to change the header graphic. You need to come up with different graphics that fit what you want to do, that’s really important. If you want to talk about cooking and have a header graphic of some ducks in a pond it won’t work and you will just confuse your readers. Unless you are talking about cooking ducks of course. Some of them have slide shows built into them. This is pretty but it is more work to set up.

Second is how many columns are going to be used. You can have one on the left middle and right or just middle and right. Personally I would start with the middle and right for the first try. To me the three columns themes look to busy. Your readers might get lost on your page.

Next is color of your blog. To me this is a biggy. Don’t get to elaborate with the colors. A rule of thumb is no more than three colors. Your mind has trouble processing more than that.

Just remember if you don’t like the way it looks YOU can install another theme with all of your posts still in it. You don’t have to redo everything.

The “Writing Settings” tab

Hub McNett — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:33:07 +0000

As we go to the next item in the settings you will find the "Writing Settings". It would be advisable to setup the “Post via e-mail” options so you can get your e-mail messages if you plan to get them through your server. If you don’t want to use your server you don’t really need to set them up at this time. There are widgets that can be used to send and receive the e-mails. On the Writing Settings there is also an area you can use for Update Services. The Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. Without this no one would know you updated it and it would just be dead words on an unknown page. Some free web hosts have disabled your ability to alert update services. The rest of the “Settings” I wouldn’t worry about at this time. There are a lot of things that you can do in it to customize your blog page. So you might want to look through all of the settings to see if there is something you want to change. Just remember to look at your blog to see what they did to it for each item you change. If you do a lot of changes at one time and don’t look at it then you risk not being able to find how to undo one of them.

It all starts here

Hub McNett — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 18:02:14 +0000

With many years of writing web pages and setting up databases I decided to create a blog using WordPress. This blog is my journey in setting it up and exploring some of the templates, widgets and plugins that can be used. I downloaded WordPress 3.1.3, which is in newest version, which has been downloaded over 13 million times. I won’t go into the installation because WordPress.org has a great deal of information on that subject at http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress#Installation. The first thing I ran into was what to call my blog. At first I thought that I would just call it my name. That is a bad idea. When someone is searching for information how are they going to know that my name has anything to do with the information that is in my blog. After some sole soul searching I decided to have the Site Title called “BlogPress 101” because that explains what my blog is all about. The next thing down in the General Settings is what is called a Tagline. This is a one-liner that further explains your site. You can get as creative on this one as you like. Make it good for the search engines to use it. Not something like “WOW This Is FUN” or something like that.