In my previous blog, I wrote an overview on the first initial steps required for anyone to setup a personal website. Now, I would like to take you further into the world of wordpress, themes, etc. If I have to guess, your website has just started to take shape, you have made your initial planning and have a specific idea in your mind about your website design and content. You have also registered your domain name and selected a feasible hosting service for the purpose. It is now ready to install wordpress on your website and get accustomed to the various features and plug-ins available.
1. Control Panel – Before we go into installation of WordPress, we will need to configure a couple of things on the hosting service provider account. Most of the providers have a ControlPanel(Freehostia) or a cPanel(gator) to help you configure, manage and maintain all the hosting account features like email accounts, MySQL databases, FTP accounts etc. One of the first initial and required step is to configure your email account. WordPress requires you to provide a valid email address and it is always ideal to use your base domain name email account for configuring and registering with WordPress and also for any further communications regarding your website. Also you will need to setup a MySQL Database which is also a pre-requisite for installing WordPress.
2. WordPress Installation – To install WordPress, most of the hosting services provide a single click install process which is as easy as it sounds. However, you can always visit WordPress.org to download the latest stable version onto your local computer and follow the Famous Five Minute Install procedure as mentioned here. Once you have installed and configured WordPress on your website, you may want to install it on your personal laptop for your future use during the website development.
3. Themes – Choosing a theme that suits your needs is one complicated process. There are several themes available to choose from which makes it even more difficult to finalize on one. WordPress comes with some basic default free-themes, but you may always look into sites like Daily Blog Tips or WordPress Theme Base. For my site, I have used the theme Elements of SEO and of course I have modified quite a bit from the initial download. Theme is an ever-changing feature since you will always find some nice-to-haves when you google around, and would like to implement the same in your existing theme. I have spent quite some time to arrive at what I have now, and of course it has remained dynamic each day.
4. Plug-Ins -You can refer to my previous blog on Top 5 Plug-Ins which explains what are the most important plug-ins one would need as a basic necessity. I will surely keep updating the blog with my new findings as we go further into these endless possibilities.
I think once we have reached at this stage, we are just a few steps away from publishing the website and making it public. In my next blog I will talk more about the few other interesting topics like Tags, Permalinks, PillarPosts etc. Hope you found this information useful.
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Praveen you’re lucky to be a programmer so as to customize the theme you have chosen for your blog. I am erring and stumbling my way around my template to tweak it to my taste. Maybe you could do some posts about customizing templates, about how some codes look and what changes to make in them… like background images, changing colors, reducing the size of the sidebar panel etc. I am sure you’ll find a lot of takers for those posts!
Aarthi, thanks for the feedback and nice to know you are following my posts. I will surely cover the topics you have mentioned in one of my next posts so as to help you out with the basics. I dont think you need any programming skills to do that, just an understanding of what each of your theme files refer to will be enough. Anyways, you have given me a ray of hope for my blog.
The part when we arrive at theme designing, I think one wouldn’t find difficult if he’s already set a particular theme background in mind well before reaching that stage, but yes I agree it’s an ever-changing feature so it’s very unlikely to stick up to only one theme parmanently.
I thank you praveen for delivering to us such informational pieces of writing .
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