Barry Hand

Blog­ging has really kicked off in Ire­land, with both com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als see­ing the ben­e­fit of blog­ging as well as using blog soft­ware as the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem of choice for their website.

I’ve put together a guide that I’ve used when cre­at­ing, installing or con­fig­ur­ing blogs, get­ting the best plu­g­ins and con­fig­ur­ing the var­i­ous options to make it secure & optimised.

As well as that, I’ll include set­ting up Google Ana­lyt­ics, Feed­burner and Google Web­mas­ter Tools.

What’s needed

1. A domain name and web­site host­ing — I like using Digi­web Host­ing in Ire­land, and UK2 in the UK.
2. FTP Client — I rec­om­mend Filezilla, it’s free & cross platform
3. Some basic web­site knowledge

Step 1 — Down­load WordPress

Down­load the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press, which comes in zip for­mat. Unzip the files to some­where on your com­puter, you will be left with a folder called “wordpress” — inside this folder are the files you need to upload.

Here’s where you make the choice on where you want to install your blog, I rec­om­mend using it in the root direc­tory for a new web­site, or at blog​.web​site​.com for an exist­ing web­site where you want to add a blog. Never upload it as web​site​.com/​w​o​r​d​p​r​ess.

If you want to have all your blog con­tent at web​site​.com/​b​log you can enable this in the set­tings after install with­out hav­ing to specif­i­cally install word­press in a sep­a­rate folder.

Step 2 — Cre­ate Data­base & Data­base User

This is rel­a­tively straight for­ward, most web­site hosters give access to a con­trol panel which allows you to con­fig­ure your web­site options. Here’s my exam­ple from Digi­webs CP using the cre­ate MySQL wizard.

You’ll need to give your data­base a name, and descrip­tion — it helps if these are mean­ing­ful, next step is to cre­ate a data­base user, and cre­ate a pass­word — I use this online tool to gen­er­ate ran­dom pass­words.

Keep track of the name of the Data­base, Data­base User, and the Data­base server IP/URL (like mysql​.web​site​host​ing​.com)

Step 3 — Edit­ing the WP-CONFIG file

Before upload­ing the files, you need to edit one file, the wp-config-sample.php file. Open this file up using your favourite text edi­tor (notepad/textedit) and look for the following.

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'barryh_test'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'barryh_test'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'mysql1.hosting.digiweb.ie');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

You’ll need the data­base infor­ma­tion saved ear­lier, enter it.

Next up, look for this part:

define(’AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(’SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(’LOGGED_IN_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(’NONCE_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);

Visit Word­Press Secret Key for and copy and paste the details (this link is unique for each visit — hit refresh to see)

These secu­rity keys are used for encryp­tion of cook­ies and improve secu­rity of your blog.

All done, save the file as wp-config.php (drop­ping the –sam­ple from the filename).

Step 4 — Upload­ing Files

Open up Filezilla(or your FTP client of choice), and cre­ate a FTP con­nec­tion to your web­site host — you should have these details when you pur­chased your host­ing — you need Host/IP, User­name & Password

Con­nect and nav­i­gate to your web­site folder (usu­ally websitename.com) — this is the root direc­tory. With the pane to the left being your local files, and the right being your web­site remote files.

Almost done, now upload all the local files to the remote server (drag all files left to right) — this will take a few min­utes depend­ing on your net­work speed.

Step 5 — .htac­cess & Chang­ing FTP Permissions

While still in Filezilla, here are a few really use­ful things to do before fin­ish­ing up. First up, down­load my .htac­cess tem­plate(right click>save). Open this file and change bar​ry​hand​.ie to your web­site address.

# CANONICAL URL
# Change 'barryhand.ie' to your website address
rewritecond %{http_host} ^barryhand.ie [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.barryhand.ie/$1 [r=301,nc]

This cre­ates a search engine friendly method of redi­rect­ing your web­site address to include www. — More on canono­cial urls here.

Save, and upload to your server. Right click the uploaded file and rename to “.htac­cess” (remov­ing barry)
In filezilla the file might dis­ap­pear from list­ing, click the Filezilla menu ‘Server’ and enable ‘force show hid­den files’

Next up, right click .htac­cess and Set File Per­mis­sions to 777.

This allows the file to be edited by Word­Press later on (for set­ting up seo’d permalinks)

While also in Filezilla, nav­i­gate to WP-CONTENT and cre­ate a new folder called ‘uploads’ and set per­mis­sions to 777 — this will be used for upload­ing images through Word­Press later on. More infor­ma­tion on chang­ing file per­mis­sions here.

Step 6 — Run­ning the installer

Open a browser, and nav­i­gate to your​web​site​.com/​w​p​-​a​d​m​i​n​/​i​n​s​t​a​l​l​.​php this will run the installer script.

Fill in your blog title (you can change this later), your email and make sure Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Tech­no­rati is checked. Click install and that’s it!

The next screen will give you your admin user­name and pass­word, log in using these details. That’s it — you’ll get the Word­Press dashboard.

Step 7 — Change Perma­link Structure

Goto Settings>Permalinks — The default perma­link is http://​web​site​.com/​?​p​=​123. This is poor for SEO, and doesn’t tell your vis­i­tors any­thing about the link they’re viewing.

I rec­om­mend post title (http://​web​site​.com/​t​i​t​l​e​-​o​f​-​p​ost), even though I cur­rently use category/post title((http://website.com/category-name/title-of-post)

Enter /%postname% into the cus­tom field, click on save — the file edited earlier(.htaccess) is the file which get’s over­writ­ten here. If you get an error, it’s because the file is not editable.

Step 8 — Secu­rity Settings

Remove the admin account: this is a good idea for secu­rity, and also it’s bet­ter to have a real author than see­ing a post made by ‘admin’.

Goto Users>Add New and fill in your details, make sure you set your­self up as an admin­is­tra­tor. Now you can delete the admin account and login again using your new user account.

Step 9 — Cre­at­ing an XML Sitemap

You can install plu­g­ins via the Plu­g­ins menu on the left hand side, you’ll need that FTP information.

For this you’ll need to install the Google XML Sitemap plu­gin, this plu­gin cre­ates a list of all URL’s on your blog and puts them in an easy to read for­mat for Google­bot, this ensures Google has the full list of URL’s to index.

To run this gen­er­a­tor, click on rebuild man­u­ally — you should get an error here, to fix the per­mis­sions you can tem­porar­ily change your blog folder per­mis­sions to 777, rebuild the sitemap which will cre­ate a file called sitemap.xml. Change the per­mis­sions on this file to 777, and then change the blog folder per­mis­sion back to 755.

Step 10 — Google Web­mas­ter Tools & Sitemaps

So now we’ve got an sitemap.xml file, Next step is to link this to your Google Web­mas­ter Tool account, Google’s Web­mas­ter Tools allows you to get some extra infor­ma­tion on how Google view’s your web­site. First of all signup prefer­ably with your main Google account (which you might already use for AdWords etc.)

You’ll need to ver­ify your web­site, with two options — either add a meta head tag, or upload a blank html file

I pre­fer the upload method. Cre­ate a blank file as above and upload this to the web­site root, it should ver­ify pretty quickly.

As your sitemap con­tains noth­ing much so far, you’re not going to get any mean­ing­ful data here, but it’s impor­tant to get this done cor­rectly from the start. After a while you’ll get all sorts of use­ful infor­ma­tion that only you will be able to see.

Step 11 — Google Analytics

Google Ana­lyt­ics is a free ser­vice which gives detailed infor­ma­tion on web­site traf­fic. Signup for an account and you’ll get cus­tom track­ing code to imple­ment, make sure this is the newer track­ing code (ga.js) — copy it some­where for the next step.

If you’re com­fort­able with edit­ing your tem­plate files, you can just go ahead and drop that code in the footer, although there’s a nice plu­gin — Ulti­mate Google Ana­lyt­ics, this allows you to paste the track­ing code in the word­press backend.

Once installed, check back to Google Ana­lyt­ics to check that data is being col­lected prop­erly. Google Ana­lyt­ics Blog is a handy place for offi­cial information.

Step 12 — Feed­burner for RSS

Acquired by Google, Feed­burner is like a swiss army knife for your RSS feed. Signup and add a new feed.

Enter your blog or feed address, here’s a nice guide on how to con­fig­ure feed­burner. Two of the nice fea­tures are the abil­ity to offer feeds by email, and to embed feeds as HTML or use as a signature.

↑ Grab this Head­line Animator

After set­ting up Feed­burner, you now need to redi­rect the blog feed to feed­burner, pretty straight for­ward guide here from Google.

Step 13 — Extra SEO settings

Almost there, last rec­om­mended plu­gin is the most down­loaded one for Word­Press called All in One SEO Pack, this con­tains the abil­ity to con­fig­ure rec­om­mended SEO options which the default install lacks. Install it and go to the set­tings page.

Step 14 — Themes

So after all of this, all of the rec­om­mended set­tings and plu­g­ins have been applied, you’re still stuck with the default theme. Luck­ily there’s a wide choice of free themes, as well as pre­mium one’s like these from woothemes.

Step 15 — Anti-Spam

Just before you announce your new blog to the world, enable Akismet (Plugins>Akismet Conig­u­ra­tion). You’ll need an API key, but it’s very easy to gen­er­ate one. This plu­gin helps tackle spam comments.

Is that it?

This is by no means every­thing, just some of the sim­ple steps I’ve used when cre­at­ing & con­fig­ur­ing Word­Press blogs. There are a huge amount of plu­g­ins and options avail­able which will allow your blog to do almost any­thing!