All that you have to do is to sit down in front of your PC/Laptop open up a text editor in one window and the site in another. Read through the first page of the site. When you have read it, start to think. What is this page about? Which of the words that appear in the document describe the contents of the page accurately? What kind of words or phrases would someone use if he was using a search engine and trying to find documents like this? When you have found the answers to these questions, write down the words and the phrases you have come up with. It doesn’t matter if the list becomes too long, as you can always remove some of the excess words later.

When doing keyword optimization simply select one or two medium-popular keywords or phrases per page. These are the main targets, and start to optimize heavily for them. Subsequently squeeze a few less common phrases and words into the body text, hoping that they will help the page to come up on some obscure multi-word searches. Repeat this process for every page on your site. You should be able to create an individual, distinct list of keywords for each page. The different lists should not “compete” with each other; instead each should cover different areas. This does not however mean that there shouldn’t be any similarities between your lists - it’s perfectly OK to have some, but the lists shouldn’t be 100% identical. It is better to have 20 good listings on different search terms than 20 good listings on the same one.

So, now you have the list ready. The next thing would be to go to Overture’s keyword suggestion tool and type in the different keywords and phrases you’ve come up with. The tool will tell you how many times each keyword and each phrase was searched at Overture during the last month. It won’t tell you exactly how popular different words are, since the statistics contain only the searches executed at Overture, but it will give you a general idea. Because Overture’s data is not always 100% accurate, you may also want to visit WordTracker. The service is not free, but the trial option offers a chance to search for good keywords without having to pay a dime. By using both Overture and Word Tracker and comparing what they think about the popularity of different keywords, you should be able to separate the words people search for from those that are rarely used.

If some of the words you were planning to select aren’t commonly used in searches, you might want to consider dropping them from your list. If other words look like they are used quite a lot, then it might be a good idea to consider adding them. But remember to…Keep the search engine optimization process in mind! By now, your list is probably pretty full of very competitive, single-word terms such as “songs” or “design” or “laptops” or whatever. Scratch them. This might sound harsh, but if you’re a novice, you have no chance of achieving a top listing under such terms. Even many professionals tend to avoid them, as they are extremely competitive. There are hundreds of thousands of sites targeting them and even with excellent search engine optimization skills; they are very tough to conquer. What you should do is to contract it down a little.

However, think about different variations of these popular keywords. If you were originally thinking about the keyword “design”, how about “web design with your country name” or “website design/graphic design”? These terms would be, not easy, but easier to rank well under. It is far better to be in the top 10 for a search term with medium usage than to rank 500th for a heavily used term. Select key phrases that do get searched, but that aren’t too competitive. You might also want to target common misspellings, if some of the keywords related to your site are often spelled wrong. Finally, you should have completed your keyword optimization process and now possess a pretty good list of medium-popularity keyword phrases for each of your pages.

For a designer, the matter in which search engine algorithms work can be a problem. Search engines may like H1-sized headings, but many visitors consider them to be ugly. As long as the content of your pages has any effect on their ranking, there will always be a conflict between what search engines and users want. These issues are usually solved by cloaking the page, which enables the designer to show one design to search engines and another to humans. However, cloaking takes plenty of work and sometimes money. If only minor visual changes are required to please both parties, a simpler solution would seem sufficient.

What is CSS?

As the Internet has developed, HTML has received an add-on called Cascading Style Sheets. This new language opens the possibility of altering the visual representation of pages without the use of HTML. While search engines still do not understand CSS very well, nearly all browsers support it to some degree.

Although CSS doesn’t offer the same flexibility and protection as cloaking, it is well-suited for making small design changes. However, an overwhelming majority of browsers understand CSS; most of them do not support all of its features. To avoid nasty surprises, it is best to check your pages in almost all available and most used browsers. As more recent versions of these browsers have better CSS support.

There are some “legal” things that can be done with CSS, build layout or to slightly adjust the size of headings and body text. Search engines consider the techniques which are known as spam, and it probably may ban a website if choose to use them. Using CSS to cheat the engines isn’t safe - it’s just somewhat safer than doing it with the traditional HTML method.

It may give a tricky impression at first, but try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and take a long look at the message that your website delivers to the public. Pretend that you are a potential customer and it’s your first time ever visiting your company website. Let’s start by visiting the home page. Does it contain “sticky” content that is visually and mentally appealing? That is, does it have what it takes to keep today’s savvy consumer clicking through your site. Customers are getting more and more knowledgeable about the Web as time passes by, and their time is extremely valuable.

They are accustomed to getting what they want and when they want it. If they aren’t impressed right from the get-go, they will simply move on to the next company, in search of the product or service that your website could not provide. Your home page is a VERY significant, if not the most important, part of your overall website. Take the time to figure out exactly what your customers are looking for and make it readily available on your home page, or at least have a prominent link to the product or service in plain sight. Try to create headlines that grab the viewer’s attention and make them ask for more.

Next, make sure that your website navigation is clean and user-friendly. If you have buttons that lead the user into a dead-end corner of your site with no way out, then you have major problems to correct. The website user should never have to use the “Back” button in their browser to navigate. If they get lost, they will leave your site.

Your product or service pages should be informative and lead the customer to a course of action. Those pages should steer the customer into purchasing online, calling you directly or requesting more information or a custom quote. Make sure that your phone number, preferably a 1-800 number, is visible on every page of the website, therefore lowering the path of resistance to making a sale. Also, be sure that the rest of your contact information is easily accessible. That includes your phone number, address and/or a contact form or email address to reach you. We have seen many websites that do not post an address or phone number, leaving the potential client feeling weary about the company’s credibility.

Last but not least, if your webmaster or web design firm lacks the skills to produce a visually appealing site with strategically planned content and functionality, then hire someone that is able to do that. It will pay off in the end!

Site maps are compulsory for website to obtain a high position in search systems, because search systems highly rate sites which have a site navigation map.

A site map should contain the following

• A short annotation to the site, in which fundamental keywords will be used in text links to main pages of your site standard navigation panel, where all other links to all pages in the site will be located.
• A well-conceived site map should lead to all site nodes. In this way you will get higher priority in when searching the system.

Basic Advice on the Creation of Site Maps

A site map should communicate with the design of the site. Departing from the common conception a site map, as from any other identical document, does not give your site its full measure of attractiveness, and even to the contrary can unnecessarily frighten away users.

The use of graphics elements during the creation of a site map is not desirable. Lately most users surf the Web by sites in the Internet in the mode which excludes graphics images. For this reason the presence of graphics as navigation elements in your site map will not be considered very helpful, as they will not function for all users, and the map will be merely a rudimentary representation of your creation. Ideally, therefore, a site map should look the same in all web browsers, for all website visitors.

The map’s structure should associate to the hierarchy of the site itself. For the structure of a site map it is desirable to use headers and lists. The use of tables makes this process much more difficult.

It is desirable to place the link to your site map on the main or first page of your website and to make it in such a way that the user could, if necessary, quite easily use it. The user should not stop for one second to think about what he should do, when he doesn’t know what to do further after landing on your website.

Keyword research carried out Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Word tracker, you can discover which keywords are searched for the most recurrently and then specifically target those phrases. Doing keyword research is also critical for your site’s usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you’ll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.

For example, you might decide to target the phrase, “web design”, as your website does in fact do website design. Keyword research would certainly show you that web users are actually searching for, “web design” (think about it - have you ever searched using the word, “WEB DEVELOPMENT”, when you want to look for web designing companies?). By placing the phrase, “web design” onto the pages on your website, you’ll be using the same words as your site visitors and they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for more easily.

200 word minimum per page Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalizing that page in the search rankings. In terms of usability, it’s also good to avoid pages with very little content. A page with less than 200 words is unlikely to contain a large amount of information, so site visitors will undoubtedly need to click elsewhere to find more detailed information. Don’t be afraid to put a reasonably large amount of information on to a page. Web users generally don’t mind scrolling down anymore, and provided the page provides mechanisms to aid it shouldn’t be too difficult for site visitors to locate the information that they’re after.

100kb maximum HMTL size If 200 words is the minimum page content size, then 100kb is the maximum, at least in terms of HMTL file size. Anything more than this and search engines may give up on the page as it’s simply too big for them. A 100kb HMTL file will take 20 seconds to download on a 56k dial up modem, used by three in four UK web users as of March 2004. Add on the time it takes for all the other parts of the page to download, such as images and JavaScript files, and you’re looking at a highly un-user-friendly download time!

CSS used for layout The website of Juicy Studios saw a six-fold increase in site visitors after switching from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search prefers CSS-based sites and is likely to score them higher in the search rankings because: The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines, important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document and there is a greater density of content compared to coding. Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.

Meaningful page title If you know anything about search engine optimization you’ll know that search engines place more importance on the page title than any other attribute on the page. If the title adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about. A meaningful page title also helps site visitors’ work out where they are, both within the site and the web as a whole. The page title is the first thing that loads up, often quite a few seconds before the content, so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real aid to help users orientate themselves.

Headings and sub-headings used Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings summaries the content immediately below them. Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they greatly aid scanning. Generally speaking, we don’t read on the web, we scan, looking for the information that we’re after. By breaking up page sections with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, scanning becomes significantly easier. Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.

Opening paragraph describes page content That search engines love content has already been established, but they especially love the first 25 words or soon each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page, you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area. As web users, whenever we arrive at a web page the first thing we need to know is whether this page has the information that we’re after. A great way to find this out is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it adequately describes the page content, should help us out.

Descriptive link text Search engines place a lot of importance on link text. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say ‘click here’, search engines can’t gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, ‘widgets’ then search engines can easily guess what that page is about. One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, ‘miserable failure’. So many people have linked to George Bush’s bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush’s bio appears top of the search rankings!

As web users, we don’t generally read web pages word-for-word. We scan them looking for the information that we’re after. When you scan through text you can’t take any meaning from the word ‘click here’. Link text that effectively describes its destination is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words.

Frames avoided Frames are quite an old-school technique, and although aren’t as commonplace as they once were, do still rear up their ugly head from time to time. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your search engine ranking, as most search engines can’t follow links between frames. Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they’ll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site! Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and bookmarking. Put simply, say no to frames!

Quality content provided This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search engine optimized website, but it’s actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to looking at page content, look at the number of links pointing in to web pages. The more inbound links a website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear. By providing creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, webmasters will want to link to you as doing so will add value to their site visitors. You will also be adding value to your site visitors. Eventually, optimizing your website for both search engines and people needn’t be a trade-off. With this much overlap between the two areas, you should simply be able to have a website that web users can find in the search engines, and when they do find it, they can find what they’re looking for quickly and professionally.

In certain cases, each of those issues could be important considerations. But generally speaking, those aren’t the kind of questions to worry about. There are plenty of details, however, that do deserve much attention. For example: Is it crystal clear to visitors what they are supposed to do on your site? It’s critical to ensure that you’ve provided straight-forward directions to visitors as to what they should do on your site. Also, make sure your calls to action are properly emphasized and properly placed. In other words, don’t let them be overshadowed.

Have you answered all the objections visitors might raise? Visitors will have questions and hesitations at various points throughout the process of making a decision to buy. Are you answering those concerns at the points where they are likely to come up? It doesn’t count to just have the information on the site somewhere; it needs to be in the right place at the right time.

Have you emphasized the benefits of your services, not just the features?

Is your site organization clear and straightforward, and is it oriented around visitors’ needs and priorities? This is one question site owners continually fail to consider. The details of how you choose to organize the pages and information on your site will be very significant to your visitors’ experiences. Consider things from a visitor’s point of view, and organize around your visitors’ priorities not your internal company structure. The same goes for individual page layouts, not just the site organization as a whole.

Do the graphics on your site visually emphasize the most important items on each page? Take a long hard look at your pages and figure out which elements really stand out. Are you visually drawing attention to the important stuff?

Does your site draw along a path to an end goal? Every website should be a process geared toward getting visitors to take certain actions. It’s your responsibility as a site owner to figure out the details of how that process should work and which steps happen where. Have you specifically designed your site so that everything including all the small details that leads to your end goal?

Do you prod visitors along at appropriate points to motivate them to take the next step? Have you provided compelling calls to action at the points where visitors need to do something?

Have you made sure your copy is simple and engaging all the way through? This is an area where you should focus on details relentlessly. Make every word count.

Have you considered everything from a visitor’s point of view, not just a site owner’s point of view?

If you want to create an effective website, get intimately acquainted with your visitors’ mindset. Learn to identify with your visitors’ feelings all the way through from the very beginning of the process to the very end. Understand their specific needs, their concerns, and the benefits that speak to their hearts. Learn to tell when they have enough information and when they need more. Anticipate the points at which questions and objections are going to be raised and understand which questions and objections are going to occur when.

After you’ve done that, analyze the details of your site. The answers you’ve determined for the above questions will affect the fine points of your graphic design, of your page layouts, and of your overall site organization. Purposely evaluate why each element of the page is placed the way it is and identify what purpose every item serves. It’s not enough to just launch a website. You have to make the details count!

Besides familiarity, there’s a second reason to be consistent. It helps your credibility. Consistency in your navigation helps you present a unified, cohesive image to your visitors. In other words, you look polished, well-thought-out, and on top of things. Your visitors get the impression that you “have it together”. On the other hand, if your navigation is inconsistent, it reflects badly on you and your company. You’ll look disorganized and unprofessional.

Here are 3 ways to maintain consistency in your navigation:

1. Use global navigation (which is a set of your main links that appears on every page of your site in the same place).

Global navigation is an absolute necessity. It ensures that visitors can always get to the main sections of your website quickly and easily.

Global navigation options must be the same on every page. Many sites resoundingly fail in this area. Often, the order of the links varies from page to page, or some links are missing on certain pages. This confuses even experienced web users.

2. Keep the appearance and placement of buttons and secondary links the same throughout the site.

I recently ran across a site that used three completely different styles of buttons in as many pages. This variation blew any unified appearance they hoped to have. It also made it hard to recognize which graphics were links and which were not, since there was no consistently-used symbol for “clickability”.

On another site, secondary navigation options were on the left on some pages and on the right on other pages. That’s a no-no. Visitors will never be sure where to look for additional options, particularly since this site was visually busy. Don’t move links around from page to page.

Link colors, button styles, fonts, and placement should be the same throughout the site. The goal should be for visitors to instantly recognize a link when they see it.

3. Stick with conventional design standards.

In addition to being consistent within your site, you also need to be consistent with other sites. Don’t get too far out on the fringe in trying new things.

If you use a navigation scheme that’s completely different from what you see on most other sites, visitors will likely be confused. Make your navigation look and function like something visitors will be familiar with from other sites.

Web browsers can only view 256 colors and even some browsers can see only 216 colors. If you want the color you chose for your website, should appear to everyone, exactly as designed by you then go ahead with 216 colors pallet. Always use web browser safe color.

Color combination is also very important aspect. Some color combinations are very unimpressive such as Yellow text on Blue Background. That’s why black text on white background is the easiest color combination to read. What can be the intention of any web designer? Obviously, to make an interactive web page and interactivity comes with the colors you choose for web page. Color affects our feelings, our perceptions and our interactions.

What do colors say?

White: White is the best background color on a web page. White color shows truthfulness, Purity, devotion etc. It’s the most refreshing and superlative color.

Red: Red is the most emotionally vivid color and may cause a faster breathing. It symbolizes energy, action, confidence and passion.

Orange: Orange is very hot color to the human eye. Orange demonstrates warmth, cheer, strength and ambition.

Black: Black is the favorite color of web designers to display text but it effects very bad when used as background. It suggests excitement, speed and demands attraction.

Blue: Blue is the second most popular color between web designers. It is associated with stability and depth. It represents wisdom, confidence and loyalty.

Green: Green is the most compatible color with eyes and has a great healing power. It shows growth, harmony and fertility.

Yellow: Yellow is the color which enhances concentration. It shows wisdom, joy and happiness.

Pink: Pink is a quiet color and symbolizes sweetness, softness and innocence.

Brown: Brown color provides you the feeling to mix up with the background. It represents politeness and richness.

Think about your primary audience like if you are designing a website for selling toys, then using pink and blue will be productive. Don’t use more than two or three colors on a single page. Use the same background color on each page. It should not be like that ‘Home Page’ has a White Background and ‘Contact Us’ has a Yellow Background. Avoid making larger parts of web site with very bright colors. If the company for which you are designing website has already an established Logo, then make it sure that the color of Logo on the website must match with the real color. Maintain the consistency because it really works. Your visitor may be irritated with your stupid color choice.

Try to be color wise and color safe, you will be able to feel the color of success.

All the graphics elements should be placed in the same folder named IMG or images. Then the IMG folder is copied into the html-pages catalog. Now the person involved in professional web design and web development may think about how to implement the image into the web pages. We use the attribute SRC to specify the location of the image resource. SRC stands for “source”. The value of the SRC attribute is the URL of the image you want to display on your page. In other words, the attribute SRC shows the file’s location. Here is how the syntax of a defined image should look like: <img src=”url” > where URL stands for image location (i.e. where the image is stored). However, besides this one, there are other attributes responsible for different additional features related to image placement on the web pages.

The ALIGN attribute serves to align the graphics on your web page. The attribute allows two values assigned - left and right. The value LEFT makes the web browser place an image on the left of the text as well as the value RIGHT allows to place the image on the right relative to the text. You should note that if the attribute ALIGN has already been used to align the text relative to the graphics on your specified page, you will not be allowed to set the parameters of text flow around the image. The attribute ALIGN allows to place the text between two graphical images. In this case the tags describing the image shall be placed over the text that is to be enclosed between them.

The ALT attribute helps to add comments that will be reflected if the web browser cannot load the graphics on your web page. The attributes WIDTH & HEIGHT help to assign the width and the height of the image you are placing. However, these attributes are not recommended to be used for the images in jpg format since an incorrect value assignment may result in deterioration of graphics quality. So before you insert any graphics on your web pages you should correct its parameters with the help of any graphics editor. If the while background of the page is not what you really want, you can put any graphical background on your page with the help of the attribute BACKGROUND of the tag <BODY>. Since the web browser automatically places the image copies the way they fill in the whole page, so the image you apply for your background may be done small in size.

You should remember that while creating a graphical background of your page you should use such images that provide interesting visual effects and at the same time that would not disturb your customers from reading the text itself. For example, placing a text on the page with tiger background would result in lost of interest to your content since the reading would be completely uncomfortable in this case. A good image being repeated multiple times looks “smooth”, without any seams or joints. Don’t forget to pay attention to the color and size of your font if you make a graphical background to achieve absolute easiness in reading. The attribute BORDER helps the designers to assign the frame’s size around the graphical image. Experienced web graphic designers recommend using gif format for graphics web site elements such as menus and banners and for jpg format for full-color images. Anyway, whatever you apply, keep in mind the fact that you are creating your professional web design for your potential customers and your web site should be easy to use from the point of web graphic design and web development.

So what is a blog anyways? A web LOG is a website. It is written using a server-side programming language like PHP, ASP, or PERL. A Blog is a web site created in a way that enables the user to add content in the form of pages or posts. Pages are what you look at when surfing the net, DUH. Posts are web pages too but they are more like articles and they are displayed in reverse chronological order, the most recent articles first.

One of the most powerful features of the modern-day blog, be it from WordPress, Blogger or any of the popular softwares out there, is that they are a Content Management Systems (CMS) as well. This means that the would-be blogger needs no knowledge of HTML or CSS or any technical skills at all. If you can read and have an attention span greater than 8 minutes you’re all set.

Get Started

Before you get started making your own personal blog there are a couple things you should think about first. What is your blog about and what is it called? This has happened to me and I’m sure a thousand other people as well… I get my database created; I download WordPress and begin the install process, “Yeah it’s done!” Then there it is, the first thing your new blog asks you is “what is my name?” I’ve spent hours starring at this screen rummaging through hundreds of possible names. Which one is more descriptive, which one sounds better, which one gets searched more at Google? Of course you can always change the name later but, if you’ve been indexed by the search engines and you go and change the title, could get you bumped or sandboxed.

Next, you need somewhere to put it. You need a Domain Name and a Hosting Account.

The Domain Name is the word that is in-between http://www. and .com in a URL (Universal Resource Locator). You want this to be the same as, or close to, the name of your blog… good luck. You can search available domain names at a number of places including register.com, godaddy.com, and networksolutions.com.

The internet is saturated with hosting services. I’ll let you figure that one out. There’s always Go Daddy for a good place to start, note their pricing and supplemental offers then type in “Hosting” at Google and see what comes up. Search, compare, shop, I know you can shop. You may or may not notice that there are two types of operating systems when dealing with website hosting, Windows and UNIX (or Linux). This article is about how to build a WordPress blog so I will go ahead and recommend choosing a UNIX or Linux hosting account as opposed to a Windows account. WordPress is PHP based and though many Windows systems support PHP, the language it was created for the UNIX system. A lot of times the Windows accounts are more expensive anyways.

Third, how is your site going to be organized? Is your blog going to be a section of an existing web site or is your web site going to be the blog? If it is going to be part of an existing website then you should decide what the directory will be called. The most common would be blog, a folder named blog.

Get WordPress

Got your Domain Name? Good. Got your blog’s title? Good. Got a host? Good.

Next thing you need to get is WordPress. Go to http://wordpress.org/ and click the big red “Download” button. Save the package to your desktop. Hopefully you have WinZip, if not get it here http://free-gets.com/. Unzip (Extract in WinZip terms) the whole thing onto your desktop. More times than I’d like to admit, I’ve clicked on one of the files after opening the .zip file, to have a look at the readme or something, I then clicked Extract, when I look in the WordPress folder THERES ONLY ONE FILE. Crap, have to do it again, this time without selecting anything.

Now take the WordPress folder and put it where it belongs. If your blog is part of an existing web site, rename it to “blog” or whatever you decided, and FTP it to your hosting server. If the blog IS your website then FTP the CONTENTS of the WordPress folder to your hosting server.

Set Up Your Database

When you signed up for your hosting account you got access to the services “control panel”. This control panel, which you use your username and password to access, provides an interface to all the services offered by your host including Email. Here on your control panel, somewhere, it’s different for each hosting company, is a place to create new databases as well as users to administer them. Once you find it, it really is as simple as choosing a name and a password and clicking one button. Whatever you pick, write it down though, you will need it later.

For many hosting services using your control panel username works as the database username however, some hosts may require that you set up a separate username to access databases. No biggie, just pick a good one and write it down.

You will need three things from this step; a database name, a username, and a password. You wrote them down, right?

Go to your WordPress files. And find the file named wp-config-sample.php. Rename it to wp-config.php and open it up in a text editor.

Here you will see the following

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

This is fairly self-explanatory. As a matter of fact the WordPress site covers all this and much more so I understand if no one is reading beyond the point where I mention wordpress.org. Oh well, onward…

Fill in the blanks, dbname, username, etc… The last part DB_HOST, I always change it to whatever my hosting account tells me to. It will say on your host’s control panel what the address is, usually something like username.sqlhostname.com.

All filled in? Good. Upload via FTP.

Now get out your favorite browser and cruise on over to your website. Follow the directions and there you are. “What is the title of your blog?”

Set Up Your Blog

There you have it, a blog, now what. Find a nice theme, configure your sidebar widgets and add start blogging. Don’t get lost in the millions of themes and plugins and widgets, spend the time writing. Three months will have gone by and you’ll have gone through 50 themes and 20 widgets and plugins only to end up with the one theme and two or three plugins/widgets that really work for your site… and your blog still has “Hello World” as it’s only article. Get to the actual writing, the other stuff will follow.

Hopefully you’ve been able to log in to your admin area and have seen all the lovely things you can do in there. First thing you may want to do is choose a Theme. In your admin area click on the Design tab. WordPress ships with two fairly boring themes that you will see here, however, there are millions of them for download on the internet. Start here http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Next, on the top right of the admin pages click the Settings button. Here is where you fill out some of the important things regarding your website. Take your time here and make sure any changes you make are changes you really want. There is plenty of documentation on every item here either on the WordPress site or out there on the internet.

The plug-in I start with are FeedBurner-FeedSmith, Sociable, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, and the All in One SEO Pack. You just download them from WordPress, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, then FTP the unzipped files into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.