Once you’ve installed Wordpress and have your site up and running there are a number of housecleaning issues you need to do within minutes of your install.   I will cover them by category below.

Options - General

First, login to your Wordpress site using the username and password you chose for Wordpress during the install.  You will arrive at the Wordpress control panel, what many people call the Wordpress Dashboard.  Near the top of the page is an upper menu area with a light blue background.  The last menu label to the right is called “Options.”  Click on the “Options” menu tab.  This will open a page under the submenu Options/General that lists various configuration options for you to review, modify or experiment with to see how they change your site.  At the very top of the page is your Blog Title and Tagline, sort of like the name of your website and your slogan.  Anytime you wish to change this from what you chose during the install, this is the place to do it.

Below the Title and Tagline are two slots to edit your website address and your blog address.  The default that Wordpress used for both of these does not contain “www” in the addresses.  It is not neccessary, but I normally always edit these by adding www to the url addresses of both.  If you installed Wordpress in your root (or main) directory, the url address will be the same for both of these.

Below the url address area is a place to change the name of your admin email address.  Chances are you will want to leave this the same, but if you ever need to change it this is where to do it.  Below the admin email address is an area with two options under the heading “Membership.”  There are two options:

These two options are very important because they will help you control the amount of spam submissions you might get to your blog.  If you don’t want people commenting at all, deselect the “Anyone can Register” option.

Leave the “New User Default Role” as “Subscriber” to prevent anyone from posting articles to your site.

Under Date and Time you only need to change one area.  The time is set at UTC, or Universal Controlled Time.  You will need to add the correct time zone offset so that your articles reflect time of day postings that are the same as in your time zone.  I’m in the CST, or Central Standard Time Zone, so my offset is minus 6 during the winter, and minus 5 during daylight savings time, or entered into Wordpress as -5 or -6.  To know what to put for your time zone go to: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/xtra/tzdatepick.html

After you’ve completed the options changes, click on the button that says “Update Options,” located at the upper right and lower right areas of the Options page.

Options - Permalinks

You will want your blog to be search engine friendly and have every page indexed by search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.  The quickest way to accomplish this task and ensure you’re SEO-friendly is to click on the sub-menu item called “Permalinks” under the Options top menu label.  Note that under “Common Options” the “Default” radio button is selected.  If you leave this unchanged, all pages in your blog will be named after numbers and will include the question mark symbol ? in them.  We want to remove that ? because it prevents the pages from being search engine friendly.  Do this by checking the second option, to make all page names date and named based.  Now click the “Update Permalink Structure” button at the top right or bottom right side of page.  If you get an error message that says your permissions were not set correctly, you will need to temporarily change the permissions on your .htacess file to allow Wordpress to rewrite to this file to finalize the update of Permalinks.  This is not always required, but may be required on your server.  If it is, temporarily change the .htaccess file in your main Wordpress directory to permissions 777, perform the update and then change the permissions back to 644.

Congratulations!  You are now ready to start blogging to your heart’s content.   However, I highly suggest you continue looking at the various menu options under Wordpress to learn as much as you can about the power of this blogging and content managment system.  It is truly an awesome program and one you will enjoy working with for years to come.

To really get a fast start with Wordpress, I highly recommend the purchase of either one or both of the two following books from Amazon:

Perhaps one of the best kept secrets and best little-known deals in the world of e-commerce is a small independent shopping cart software company called Mals-e.com.  Based in Spain, the owner (whose first name is Malcolm) specializes in one thing and one thing only — the most robust yet simple to use shopping cart software in the world. 

Users can sign up for a free acccount with Mals-e.com to get the hang of the program, build a working shopping cart and start taking orders.  If you wish to upgrade to the “Pro” version the cost is only $24 per quarter.  Thus, for only $92 per year one can have a shopping cart that is fully compatible with all Paypal payment methods, Authorize.net, 2Checkout and most every one of the remaining major credit card or online payment processors that operate online.

The beauty of Mals-e.com is that is entirely web-based and each individual setup option is listed separately.  Thus, when setting it up, one can walk step-by-step through each bullet item in the setup area to set the program up and customize it to your satisfaction. 

You can first sign up for the free version and then convert to the Pro version later.  The free version is a fully-functionable version and will handle most all of the needs for work-at-home business owners.  It even includes an affiliate management system so you can run your own affiliate program! 

The Pro version is designed for much busier merchants and includes the following additional features:

• Remove the “Hosted by…” footer from the cart and replace with one of your own.
• Batch download of orders and payments either as one big page or in CSV format for import into a database or spreadsheet.
• Customize your secure cart pages
• Directly integrate the cart into the credit card payment gateways of Verisign, Authorizenet, Worldpay, Trustcommerce, Secpay and other supported Payment Solution Providors.
• Custom Admin area for your clients
• Advanced shipping calculations
• Simple transfer from free service
• For goods delivered on the internet you can setup an extra 500 products.

Mals must be one of the most gratified and successful work-at-home entrepreneurs that operate an online business.  He has over 137,000 online businesses using the Mals-e.com shopping cart. 

I will close this post by asking you the simple question, how many truly great web applications do you know that operates for a profit, but is willing to give away a full version of their software for anyone to use.  And on top of this, Mal is always good about responding to support emails.  He’s answered my personal emails (maybe 4 or 5 over the years) within 24 hours.  Great product, great price and value, great service — what more could you ask for?