For a new user, however, it can be a little overwhelming once they log in for the first time. The WordPress backend is a little bit heavy and offers so many tools that it can be confusing for those new to the system.

At first I was spending a lot of time on the phone talking clients through the same basic issues over and over. How do I add a new post? How do I create a new category? While these were new issues for them, I had to repeat myself over and over. So I put together a document that provides basic instructions for using WordPress and I have been providing clients with a .pdf version to help guide them through their new site.

Now I am making it available through DocStoc. Feel free to share it, embed it, pass it on, whatever you want.

Keep an eye out for my next one, a .pdf version of my Optimizing WordPress post.

Basic WordPress –

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Best Plugins for Spam:

• Askimet – One of the default plugins. It has been all I have needed for spam so far. Activate this right away.

Best  Plugins for SEO:

• All in one SEO Pack – Lets you control metadata on everypage and post.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Automically generates a sitemap and submits it to Google, MSN, and Ask.com.
• KB Robots.txt – Easily control your robots.txt file and help search engines know which pages to crawl and which ones to avoid.
• Google Analyticator – Adds the code for Google Analytics and allows you to shut it off so that visits by admins are not counted. You wouldn’t want to inflate your stats with the 100 times a day you visit your site, right?

Best Social Networking Plugins

• PingPressFM – Use ping.fm to broadcast your content to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Myspace and more.
• Share This – Add buttons to every post to enable easy sharing by visitors
• BackType Connect -BackType.com tracks comments and allows you to follow other people’s comments. This plugin will bring in a lot of conversation, including other people linking to your post, and Tweets that mention and link to your post. This is a great way to add some conversatin to otherwise slow posts.

To make your life easier

• Post to Page converter – Convert posts to pages or pages to posts with the click of a button.
• WP Post Thumbnails – Easily upload, crop and save up to three thumbnails of varying sizes for each post.
• Photo Dropper - Adds a button to the WYSIWYG editor, right next to the regular image uploader. It searches Flickr for Creative Commons images that can be used for free and automatically adds the neede attribution and credit.
• User Photo – Upload and assign photos for each user from within the admin panel. Great for multi author blogs!

Great Plugins for Developers

• Reveal IDS for Admin – Especially for theme creators, this will display all the ID’s for categories, posts, pages, tags… right in the admin page.
• The Excerpt Reloaded – Control how many words are in an excerpt, what html tags are allowed, and what the text for a ‘read more’ link would say.
• User Level Themes - Allows you to activate differrent themes so that when logged in as an admin, you can see the new underconstruction theme, while other visitors will see the current one.

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After any WordPress installation, there is a series of steps that I take in order to optimize the site, before I even think about what it will look like.

Remove or edit the Placeholder Content

There is a placeholder post titled ‘Hello World’. DELETE that, or edit it to be your actual first post.

There is a placeholder page called ‘About’. DELETE it or edit it to say what you want it to say.

Delete the user ‘admin’

If you used a one-click installation or had someone do it for you, you might have been given the default user name of ‘admin’. The problem is that hackers know that WordPress sites tend to have a user named ‘admin’ and even worse, the password is sometimes ‘admin’.

This is a huge security risk. You can not actually edit a username, so the solution is to create a new unique username and a more secure password, then DELETE the admin user.

Check your admin Email

Navigate to settings>general. Check the email address there and make sure you enter an email address you will actually check. This is the email used to notify you of comments, problems, etc.

Install and Configure Plugins

WordPress comes with two plugins already included. One should be activated and set-up and the other is a waste of time and should be deleted.

• Askimet – This is the WordPress spam protection. Activate this immediately. Once you do, you will be asked for a WordPress ‘API KEY’. You will need to go to WordPress.com to set-up an account there. Once you do, you will be able to find the ‘API KEY’ on your profile page. Copy it, return to your new site, and paste the ‘API KEY’ into the Askimet settings. You can find the Askimet settings in the admin menu under ‘Plugins>Askimet Configuration’.
• ‘Hello Dolly’ – This is a useless waste of space. Delete it. To say anything more would waste even more space.

When it comes to finding and adding more plugins, there are countless plugins available that can add a lot of capability to your site. Some are just for fun and completely optional, but others are highly recommended for any site and there is a list of plugins that I install on almost every site.

You can see my post about plugins here.

But here are two that shouldn’t be missed:

• All in one SEO Pack
• Google XML Sitemaps

Navigate to the plugins page in the admin section. At the bottom, you will see the ‘Plugin Browser/Installer’. Click on that and you can search for plugins by type or by name. You can then install them with one click right from there.

Fix Permalinks

Each post and page that you create in WordPress has a permanent home called a ‘permalink’. This is simply a permanent (sort-of) URL that you can use to link directly to that post. When you first install and set-up WordPress, it creates URLs based on the ID number that it uses in the databse to keep track of everything. If you look at the URL, it will look something like this: ‘http://mysite.com/?p=1′.

The problem (besides being ugly – hence the name ‘ugly URL’ or ‘ugly permalink’) is that search engines use the URL as one of the most important factors for deciding what a page is about. Wouldn’t it be much better if you wrote a post about an event you just photographed and the URL could be something like ‘http://mysite.com/beverly-hills-wedding/’ instead of ‘http://mysite.com/?p=1′?

This is an easy fix in WordPress.

• In the admin area, navigate to settings>permalinks.
• Under ‘Common Settings’ you will probably see that ‘default’ is checked off.
• Under that is a series of options for more SEO friendly (and reader friendly) URLS.
• ‘Month and Name’ is best for sites with one author.
• ‘Day and Name’ would be better for a multi author site where you might expect tbe publishing a large amount of content.

The difference between ‘Day and Name’ and ‘Month and Name’ is simply that you can’t have duplicate URLS, so if you want a little  more room to allow for potential duplicate titles, use ‘Day and Name’. This would make everyday start fresh, because you are using the day, month and year as part of the URL. The odds of even a big site creating duplicate titles in one day are pretty slim.

What happen if you do create duplicate post titles? WordPress simple puts a ‘-2′, then’-3′ after the title. Nothing breaks. It’s not terrible.But we went through all of this for prettypermalinks that actually mean something and don’t have meaningless numbers. Might as well try to keep it that way.

Add Ping Services

Ping services allow different blog and RSS listing services to be notified when you post new content to your site. The idea is to help get the word out and hopefully drive some traffic to your site. By default, WordPress only lists one ping service – pingomatic. You can find this by navigating to settings>writing. Towards the bottom, you will see a textarea where you can enter ping services and only one is listed – http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. But there are many more ping services out there.

There are two lines of thought:

1. Use a small list of services that in turn ping several more.
2. Directly use the list of all services so that you are not relying on a message to be passed on.

To use a small list of services that will notify others, copy this list and paste it into the ping services area under settings>writing:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

To use a longer list of services to notify directly, copy this list and paste it into the ping services area under settings>writing:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

FURTHER READING:

• How ping services work – WordPress Ping Services. They also link to this detailed explanation of the two Ping lists.
• My post about plugins.

RECOMMENDATIONS?

I have tried to include all of the suggested steps that I have found over time. If there are any that I missed that could be added to help this be a more complete list, please leave a comment and let me know. I will try to add anything that improves the process.

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Why yet another Free WordPress Theme?

As I have developed more and more sites, I have found myself repeating a lot of steps just to get started. I tried a few themes that other designers have made available with the promise of being a good starting point but was never happy with any of them.

The Problem with other starting point themes

The inspiration for this theme came because I saw others attempting to offer emptied out, basic themes as a starting point, or complex theme frameworks.

Some were out of date and needed updating to be compatible with the latest versions of WordPress. Some were packed with options and settings within the admin area. These are great for someone with out any programming knowledge who wants to simply pick a couple settings and be ready to go. Others still had so many custom hooks and little programming tricks that it would be too much of a learning curve to be worth it. Every one that I have tried or read about has either been too poorly done or too robust. I don’t want hundreds of ‘easy’ options in the admin section or a list of hooks that I can use. I just want a VERY basic starting point for constructing a simple blog theme.

What I have needed is simply an efficient way to start a fully custom basic blog. I’m talking about tweaking some colors, adding a header image, fix the fonts, and be ready to go.

Temporary Solutions

Every time out, I found myself  removing more than I was adding. Extra background images, extra style, unneeded layout, themes that required plugins to work, etc.

I actually found myself (don’t tell anyone!) starting with the default Kubrick theme and chopping out the stuff I didn’t want, digging through its awkwardly organized CSS to find all the different mentions of font-family and color, and then adding my own images and style on top of it. It wasn’t as ugly as it sounds in the end, I promise. But I would never stop at a point before adding in the new style, so that I had a good starting point next time. I always had to start with the brand new Kubrick, then chop away again.

The reason I would start with Kubrick is that I knew it at least contained everything that was needed. It has all the WordPress hooks (ensuring that it would work with all the plugins like it should), all the standard layout, all the standard style, etc. I found it surprising how many themes don’t call the wp_head(); or wp_footer(); hook, lack a widgetized sidebar, or in the worst cases claim to be compatible with 2.7.1 but do not include the wp_enqueue_script( ‘comment-reply’ ); to allow threaded comments.

Back to the drawing board

I finally sat down to create my ideal starting point theme and after outlining all of the problems I had with other themes and thinking about why I always started with Kubrick, I decided it only made sense to start there again. This wasn’t just to be easy. In fact it took a while since i wasn’t going for ugly and quick this time, I was going for clean and efficient. I wanted something that would take the least amount of time possible to edit into a new custom theme.

I won’t bore you with every detail, but I removed all the corny comments, deleted all the images, then started organizing the CSS. I wanted to remove every mention of font-family, color, background colors, link styling etc. I find that 99% of the time, I use one font-family for the entire page, then pick a couple spots to add some variation (usually with the h1, h2 tags, or maybe the post metadata).

I also renamed all of the background images so that ‘body’ has a background called ‘bg_body.jpg’, ‘#page’ has a background called ‘bg_page.jpg’, etc. This makes it easier when I save images from photoshop, try to find them later, or need to change something out.

I have been using a CSS reset for a while now. I find that it helps clean up some problems. So I started with a ‘reset.css’. Then added what remained of my newly organized and edited Kubrick on top of that as ‘default.css’. I stuck those both in a folder to hide them away, then went to my clean ‘style.css’ in my main theme folder and added only those few elements that cover a majority of the editing. In just a few lines the site’s width, fonts, basic layout, link colors, font colors, etc. can all be changed. The background image for every major part of the layout is right there, too.

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The problem is that when your site is visited from a link on the Digg site, it is now hidden within this bar as if the visitor is on Digg. There is no record of the visit to your site, because it was actually a visit to Digg. They simply display your site within theirs.

My question is is this: Is this a bad enough effect to justify blocking the DiggBar (or any frame that wants to hide your site)?

The DiggBar does make it easier for your content to be shared and ‘Dugg’. In the end, getting an article to be extremely popular on Digg, could still generate some buzz and awareness of your site. But is a burst in traffic worth it if the all the search engines are seeing is that the Digg url got all that traffic?

A Look at What Happens

Here is a look at what my recent article ‘An Introduction to SEO‘ looks like when visited from Digg (click to view full size):

As you can see, there are buttons to easily share your content through facebook and Twitter or digg the article yourself and add comments back to Digg.

That all sounds good, right

But you will also notice that the URL is a Digg URL and that is what you are sharing, not your own site. That part sounds really bad and it doesn’t actually look great to have a bar sitting on top of the design you worked so hard on (or paid someone a lot of money to work so hard on). It reminds me of the cheap old hosting services that gave you hosting in return for ads that ran on top of your page.

Plenty of people are blasting the DiggBar for using this method of serving sites within a frame, a technique that has been taboo and looked down upon for years.

Articles about the negative side:

• Webmonkey says the DiggBar is Evil
• DiggBar is Bad for SEO
• Yet another reason why DiggBar is Bad for SEO.

To make it all simple, Digg hides your site from search engines, meaning that all that traffic that might result from the Digg Effect will now go to Digg and not to your site.

Articles from Digg’s Side:

• Interview with Digg Co-Founder Kevin Rose
• Digg claims their DiggBar is NOT Evil

Ways Around the DiggBar

I found a couple solutions to this. One was to display a quick message to any Digg visitors asking them to please click over to the site. But people are lazy and this is an awkward method at best.

The second solution I found was a quick bit of javascript that redirects the traffic to your actual site. This javascript redirect will allow the site to be automatically redirected to your original URL, making sure the visitors from Digg get to your site.

To use this method all you have to do is find the ‘head’ tag in your code. It will look like this “</head>”:

In WordPress, you should find it in your theme’s ‘header.php’ file.

Then paste this code just before the “</head>”:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

My Conclusion (for now)

I like the javascript approach and have added it to my site. I think that if someone is visiting my site from Digg, they know how to use Digg, they know to look for that ‘Digg This’ link. So I don’t feel like the easy access to all that sharing in the DiggBar is such a huge benefit to be worth losing all that traffic. Plus, I have the ‘Share This’ buttons that allow anyone who likes my articles to add it Digg it,  Share it, Twitter it, Facebook it, Email it, or do anything else they want with it.

What do you think? DiggBar good or Evil? Or maybe a little of both?

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Post tags: diggbar, programming, SEO

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