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:

If you took my advice and purchased web hosting from CostCutterDomains.com, HostGator.com or BlueHost.com, you already have a very special tool that will make installing Wordpress a breeze.  The tool, a special tool for installing multiple scripts or programs on your website, is called Fantastico.  And boy is it fantastic!

When you first created your web hosting account you picked or were assigned a username and password.  This username and password allows you access to your domain’s control panel.  The control panel will give you many options, such as the ability to check your websites, add new email accounts, upload files from your PC to your website, and much more.  One of those “much more’s” is the Fantastico tool. 

To login to your cPanel control panel using HostGator.com, for example, you simply go to http://www.yoursite.com/cpanel — where “yoursite.com” is the actual name of your domain name.  When you try to visit this url address you’ll be asked for your username and password.  Once you enter your login info you’ll see a large website with many icons and labels underneath each icon noting what function you control or access by clicking on the icon.  The Fantastico icon is like a large light baby blue happy face with the label Fantastico De Luxe.

Click on the Fantastico icon and you’ll see many different programs and scripts on the left-side menu of the next page.  Underneath the “Blogs” programs you’ll see several different blog managers you can install with Fantastico.  One of these option is Wordpress.  Click on the Wordpress menu option.  Then, in the right-side column click on “New Installation” option.  This will bring up a blog configuration page.  On the configuration page leave the “Install in Directory” field leave it blank.  This will install Wordpress in your root directory.

Next choose a username and password for your blog.  Then, type in the nickname you want to appear as the “author” for all blog posts you write.  You might want to type in your first name or a ghost name if you want your name to remain a secret. 

The “Admin Email Address” field will have your default email address listed.  You may wish to change this to a custom email address, like sales@yourdomain.com or yourname@yourdomain.com, for example. If you haven’t already added a new email address that matches what you want to put in this field you can do so later, through the “Mail” menu option on your control panel.  At any rate, type in the email address you want to use for anyone responding to your blog.  Don’t forget to add this new email address via your control panel later.

Next pick a site name for your site (Fantastico will prefill this option with your domain name, but you can edit this and write any site title you choose.  Next type in a short 25 to 30 letter (or less) description for your website.  This is like a subtitle or by-line. 

If you opted to use a custom email address for the admin, you’ll need to change the e-mail account username to the email address you’ve chosen.  For example, if your username for your website is “makemoney” then you’ll see  the phrase “makemoney” in the E-Mail account username slot.  Feel free to change this to your new email address if you wish.  Thus, if your new email address you want to use for all correspondence is andy@yourname.com then your email account name username slot should be modified to read “andy.”

Lastly, add your email account password and click on the menu button below that says “Install Wordpress.”  Next, click on the option that says “Finish Installation.” 

You’re almost finish.  When a new page appears you’ll see a slot that says “Email the details for an installation.”  Add your email address here.  Lastly, click the “Send e-Mail” button and the username/password instructions and notes about the installation will be sent to you.

Now go and visit your site.  Just type your domain name into your web browser window using the following format -  http://www.yoursitename.com (substituting with your domain name, of course) and you should see a website appear for your domain with a generic blue and white website template.  You are now ready to start posting to your blog, but chances are you will want to change the template, what Wordpress calls the “theme,” so that your website won’t look so bland as the generic template you’ll see immediately after Wordpress is installed.  In my next post, I’ll provide instructions on how you can change the look and feel, or theme, for your new blog’s web design.