Version 2.0 Feel free to distribute this guide at no charge... You cannot edit or modify this guide in anyway. It must be left exactly the way it is. This guide is only accurate from the last time it was modified. You use this guide at your own risk and I cannot be held responsible for any mishaps that may occur to your website when you use this guide. You use this guide at your own risk! With that said... I hope you find this guide helpful! If you have any suggestions on how to make this better you can reach me here or head to That Marketing Dude to find out more ways to create your website and start up your own online business 1
Contents Hey What's up Guys!... Page 03 Structure of the Site... Page 05 Setting up your homepage and blog... Page 08 Essential plugins and where to find them... Page 10 Akismet - Installation Guide... Page 12 All in One SEO - Installation Guide... Page 16 Google XML Sitemaps - Installation Guide... Page 20 WordPress Ping Optimizer - Installation Guide... Page 22 Sharaholics - Installation Guide... Page 24 Contact Buddy - Installation Guide... Page 27 Time to say goodbye... Page 31 2
Hey! What's up guys! In this guide I'm going to show you how to set up your WordPress website. I'm hoping this will be a one stop guide for setting up your new website. Whether you're a complete newbie, or a WordPress veteran, I'm hoping this will help you remember the basic steps I'm going to assume you have already purchased your domain name, set up the Domain NameServers (DNS) pointing towards your host and have WordPress installed on your website. If you are a member of Wealthy Affiliate, you can install WordPress easily by using WordPress Express. We are going to start with a blank website. We are going to go over the basic structure of setting up a new website. This will include setting up a few pages: Home Page Blog Privacy Policy Contact Me About Me Also, we'll go over some of the essential plugins needed for a new website, and we'll go over how to set them up. These will include: Akismet All in One SEO Pack Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Ping Optimizer Shareoholics Contact Buddy Save you from looking up different guides for each, you'll be able to select which guide you want from the page selection section at the top. 3
Pleased don't be alarmed by that disclaimer. That's just there so IF a fault should occur, you can't go blaming me. If something does go wrong, it's always fixable and at this stage of site creation/development, not the end of the world. So, without further ado... LET'S GET STARTED! 4
Structure of Your WordPress Site We are now going to set up the structure of your website. Do this we are going to create "Pages." These are not to be confused with "Posts" So to set up this framework of pages, we are doing to go to our WordPress dashboard, and under the "Pages" section, we are going to click "Add New" This will open up the area where you create new pages. Where I've written "ADD YOUR TITLE HERE" is where you put your page name. Here you need to write "Home." Your sites homepage will be the first one we'll create. Don't worry about content yet, for now we are just building the structure of your site. You can edit the content of the pages at anytime. Once you've entered your page title, hit publish. Now repeat these steps so you have these pages: Privacy Policy Home Blog About Me 5
Contact Me Your pages section on your dashboard should now look something like this! These are the core pages for your site. Every website you create should contain all these pages. What you call them is up to you, for example I've gone with "About That Dude" rather than the traditional "About Me" or "About Us" title. Next we'll go into how to set up your homepage and blog... 6
Setting Up Your Blog and Home Page Now we have our core pages set, it's time to set up your home page and your blog. Your blog page will be where all the "posts" you create will go... and now we'll set this all up! Back to your WordPress dashboard, go down to the "Settings" tab and select "Reading" In this section we want to set up your home page and blog as "Static pages" As you can see in the image below, select "Static page" and with the drop down menus select your "Front page" as Home (Or whatever you want set as your homepage) and the "Posts page" as your Blog. 7
Hit "Save Changes" at the bottom and now all your posts will be visible under the Blog section on your site! That's it! The structure of your site is complete. You can add new pages whenever you want, but these are the pages you should have on every site. Next we'll look at the Plugins you'll need for your site... 8
Essiential Plugins and How To Find Them Some plugins, like All in One SEO, are already installed in a new website. So make sure you check what you have installed before you go searching. Here are the plugins we'll be installing to our site: Akismet All in One SEO Pack Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Ping Optimizer Sharaholic Quick Contact Form These are the plugins I install into all my sites. Some of these aren't necessary and there are others you can install like Google Analytics for WordPress. It's up to you which you want to install, but just don't over do it. If you don't need it, don't install it. Too many plugins will make your site slow because it has to load every plugin you install. Slow site = Less Visitors People won't stay on a website that's slow... I'm sure you've left many websites for the same reason. Some of you might ask why I don't install Google Analytics for WordPress? Well, my theme has a section in there to install my analytics code, so I don't need it. Neither do you, there are other methods of installing the code on your site. I'll show you later how you can add your tracking code with All in One SEO... It's extremely simple! There are two ways to find plugins. Searching through WordPress or downloading them from the developer and installing them manually. To search via WordPress, from your dashboard go down to "Plugins" then "Add New" 9
In the search bar, enter the name of the plugin you're looking for then hit "Search Plugins" Once the search results come up, you'll be able to see which plugins you have installed already. 10
Once you find the plugin you're after, click "Install" and after the plugin and downloaded, click activate. Now you have the plugin installed, activate and ready to be customised. When you look at your "Installed Plugins" sections you'll be able to toggle which plugins are activate and also adjust the settings of the plugin. If you download a plugin from a developer and want to install it, just click browse your computer when you click "add new" Now we'll go onto setting up the individual plugins in the list above, starting with Akismet... 11
Akismet Installation Guide Akismet... The plugin that helps you manage spam on your website. A MUST HAVE plugin to have set up on your website, and I'm going to show you how to do that now. The Akismet plugin will already be installed on your website so you don't have to worry about finding it and installing it, just need to set it up. So first head to your plugin section and click activate. Once you've done that, you'll find a new option in the plugin menu, Akismet Configuration. Click on that and we can get started setting it up. Now we need to get ourselves an Akismet API Key and we can do this for free. Head over to the Akismet Website and we can get it. This is very easy to set up, but can easily get confusing as there is no clear free option. So let me show you how it's done... When you're on the signup page you'll see three options, Enterprise, Pro and Personal. Go and click on the Personal option on the right. Once you've clicked on that you'll come the signup page with a slider. Now to get Akismet for free all you have to do is drag the slider all the way down to the left. 12
So fill on this form and click continue and you'll see this page: Now with whatever email address you used to register with Akismet should have an email sitting in it's inbox :) Head over there and open it up. Inside you'll find a username and password for the Akismet website so you can go in and change your settings if you need to in the future, but the bit we are looking for is the API 13
key. Once you've found it, I'd recommend you copy and paste it in a word document as you can use this for multiple sites. Now you have your code, head back over to the Akismet Configuration page in your plugin. Pop your code in the box and click save. Now you'll see a load of green bars at the moment saying Akismet has been set up correctly :) 14
And that's it. Akismet is all set up. A few things to know about Akismet. Akismet allows up to roughly 80,000 comments to pass through it's "filters" under this plan. So I've been told you can use the same API key for multiple sites so long as they are small traffic sites. If you site starts getting really popular, I'd recommend getting a separate API for your site. Also if this is the case, I'd personally look at the paid options. If your site is getting this amount of traffic you should be making a decent sum of money from it. Although this can be accessed for free I would personally start paying for it as this plugin is tremendous and the developer deserves to get some money for his efforts. So once you start making decent money from your site, please consider this. It's the right thing to do :) Now onto the next plugin... 15
All in One SEO Installation Guide This is probably one of the most important plugins you'll need to use for your site. If you're new to Internet marketing you'll soon learn the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but we won't go into it for now. Just know that this plugin is important. The plugin should already be installed on your website when you create it, you just need to activate it. If not, search for the plugin like I showed you earlier on in this guide. Make sure it's called "All in One SEO" by Michael Torbert. Right, once you click activate you now need to change the settings. To do this, on the WordPress dashboard, go down to "Settings" and there you will find a new option in the drop down menu, "All in One SEO." Click on that... Now we have a few areas to fill out, nothing difficult. First of all make sure to click the enable button so everything we enter will be active on your website. Next, fill in your "Home Title." Here I've show you what my website tab looks like when it's open in a browser. As you can see in the next image below, what you write in your "Home Title" section will also be what's written in the tab of your browser. It's up to you what you put here, but I recommend putting your site name, or like I have, site name and slogan. Now your "Home Description." This should be a sentence or two describing your site. Don't worry too much if it's not perfect as you can come back and change this as many times as you want later. What you put in here shows up on Google search results, so put a little bit of thought into this, but don't spend days on this. A brief explanation is fine for now. "Home Keywords" are some keywords describing your site. Again, don't spend days thinking about this, just add 3-4 keywords that describes your website. As you can see for mine, I've put my site name, my slogan and the niche I'm going to be using the site for. Leave "Canonical URLs" and "Rewrite Titles" checked. 16
Now, the next part doesn't need changing. Although for aesthetic reason, I have changed the to - for "Post Title Format" down to "Search Title Format." I think it look better in your browser tabs. So if you wish to do the same, make sure all your boxes look the same as the image below. 17
Now the rest can be left, head to the bottom of the page and hit "Update Options" Google analytics can actually be installed in All in One SEO. It's very simple to do as well. Now, I'm not going to go into how to get a google analytics code for your site as there are several tutorials on WA that show you how to do that. Or head to Google Analytics and follow their on screen instructions, very simple to do. 18
Anyone once you have your code. Look just below where we changed posts and page formats (the section where you changed the for -) and you'll see a box saying "Google Analytics ID." Pop your tracking code in there, that's the code beginning with UA-XXXXXXXX- XX. And that's it for All in One SEO. You are now set up! Next Google XML Sitemaps... 19
Google XML Sitemaps Installation Guide Google XML Sitemaps is an important plugin to install as this helps Google find and index all the pages and posts on our website. We want our pages and posts being indexed so they can be found in the search engines for the keywords we are using for each specific page. So, the plugin you're looking for is - "Google XML Sitemaps" by Arne Brachhold. Once you've downloaded and installed the plugin, we need to head over to the dashboard and look under "Settings" for "XML-Sitemap" At the top of this page, there will be a button saying "Build Sitemap." Click on that and a sitemap will be created. You should see something like this once it's been built: and that's it! All set up. The sitemap will be updated weekly with any new posts and pages you add to your site. If you wanted to find the location of your sitemap so you can add a link to it on your site, the location is usually http:yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Or, look for this section in the plugin's settings, and the location address will be there. 20
Sitemap done! Next, we'll look at the Ping Optimizer Plugin... 21
WordPress Ping Optimizer Guide ***UPDATED 27/03/2013*** With the latest WordPress update, this plugin is no longer needed! WordPress does this by itself now. Use the URL list below and here is where you need to put them: From the Dashboard, go under Settings -> Writing. Then you copy and paste the list below in the "Update Services" section at the bottom. Once you've done that, hit save changes and then you're done! The list of URLs to add are (updated 5th September 2012): http://api.my.yahoo.com/rpc2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping http://rpc.pingomatic.com http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/rpc2 http://api.moreover.com/rpc2 http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.feedster.com/ping http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php http://1470.net/api/ping http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b http://blogmatcher.com/u.php http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping 22
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php http://bitacoras.net/ping http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc http://www.blogdigger.com/rpc2 http://rpc.weblogs.com/rpc2 http://www.blogoole.com/ping/ http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php http://www.blogoon.net/ping/ http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogupdates http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1 http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/ http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/17 http://blog.goo.ne.jp/xmlrpc http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc http://www.catapings.com/ping.php http://coreblog.org/ping/ http://ping.blogg.de/18 http://pingqueue.com/rpc/ http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/ https://phobos.apple.com/webobjects/mzfinance.woa/wa/pingpodcast http://bblog.com/ping.php http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.myblog.jp http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://ping.weblogs.se/ http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php http://rpc.britblog.com/ http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/rpc2 http://rcs.datashed.net/rpc2/ http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.newsgator.com/ http://www.rssfwd.com/xmlrpc/api http://www.newsisfree.com/rpccloud http://www.imblogs.net/ping/ http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-prep/submitpingextended.doz http://rpc.wpkeys.com/ http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/rpc2 Now the next plugin... 23
Shareoholics Installation Guide Social sharing is even more popular than ever at the moment. So having a good social sharing plugin is pretty important! We use to use a plugin called ZillaShare, but I've found a better one and it's called to Shareaholics. So type in Shareaholic in the search bar, and download the plugin. Make sure you get the one created by Shareaholics... It's usually the top result. Now it's installed you'll see the Shareaholic tab on your dashboard menu. It'll be near the bottom of the menu. 24
Now click on that and you'll enter the plugins settings. The settings are pretty simple. You decide where you want them to appear and then what you want them to look like. So check the tick boxes where you want them to appear then click Customize. You can see the boxes I've ticked, and I'd recommend you tick the same. You don't really need social buttons to appear everywhere. You only really need them to appear at the bottom of your pages and posts. When you are writing your posts and pages you can tick the "Hide Share Buttons" for that specific page. So you can turn them off by post and page within the post and page itself. Pretty handy... Now back to customizing. 25
So let's break down the options here... Theme: This is where you change the style of the buttons. You can have them half hidden and when you hover your move they come out of hiding. You can have glossy buttons or normal buttons too. Layout: Here is where you set whether you want the buttons to appear horizontally or vertically. Size: Choose between big buttons, little buttons or rectangular buttons Counter: Do you want a counter to appear which the number of shares the post or page has had? Well you can choose to have them off, appear above or appear to the side. Alignment: Do you chose to have them centre aligned, left aligned or right aligned. Left aligned is the most common. Headline: Can you choose if you want a little headline to appear above your buttons. Options include "Sharing is Sexy!" "Sharing is Caring" and "Share the Knowledge!" You can also choose to have the headline turned off Search for services: Here you can drag and drop new social buttons into your social area. You can drag and drop to rearrange the order too. That's the social plugin. I think is much easier to use than the last one as you don't have to insert shortcode into every post you want the buttons to appear. You need to customize each section individually though, so don't forget to do that. Plus they look sexy... Now, the last plugin... Contact buddy! Let's take a look... 26
Contact Buddy Installation Guide A lot of themes come with contact forms built into them. So check your theme to see if it has. To check that, go to your contact page we created at the beginning of this guide and click edit. On the right hand side of the screen should be an area called "Page Attributes" with a drop down box. Check that drop down box for a template which should be called something like "Contact Form Template" depending on your theme. If you don't have one, continue reading on :) So, there are many contact us plugins on out there. You can have a look yourself for one you like, but the one I'm currently using is called: Contact Buddy So your first port of call is to head over to the developers site and download the plugin, which can be found here. It's free! So once you download the file to your computer we go to install it. From the dashboard, go to "Plugins" then "Add New" 27
At the top click on "Upload." Now click browse, and find the.zip file of the plugin you just downloaded. It should be called contactbuddy-by-pluginbuddycom After you've clicked "Install Now" the plugin will be uploaded. Next click activate. Once Contact buddy is installed, you'll find a new option on the dashboard, so click on that and go straight to settings This plugin is extremely simple to set up. All you need to do is decide on a style and the email address you want set up the contact form with. This will be the email address where all the submissions through the contact form will go. 28
One good thing about this contact form is that you have a double captcha form and it's easy to set up! Click on the "Click here to get a recaptcha keys" to get your keys. It's extremely simple to do. All you need to do is add your email address and your domain name. TIP: when entering your domain name click the "Global Key" box underneath the domain name and you can use the same keys on any domain you use. This will save you having to sign up multiple times. Just save your keys into a word document for future use. If it's all set up right, it should look like this: 29
Now just copy and paste the public and private keys into the settings section in the plugin. That's it! if you wanted to add it into a page, there will be a little @ next to the "Import Video/photo" button. Just click on that and it'll add the shortcode for you. 30
And It's Time To Say Goodbye... And this is the end of my Complete WordPress Set Up Guide! 9-10 hours later... and the guide is finished! I hope you guys have found this useful. I started this guide for my own benefit but I thought uploading here for all you dudes and dudettes, to use as well would be better. If you found this helpful, feel free to send it to your friends! You can find an online version here if you wished to comment on this guide or recommend any future updates. Check it out... Don't forget to head to That Marketing Dude to learn how to set up your own online business or if you wish to start living a traveller's lifestyle, we can also help you out! We show you how you can set up your own online business and how you can run it from a laptop with just an internet connection. Also, keep an eye on our freebies page to see what else you can grab for absolutely nothing! You can find that right... HERE. So please come over and say hi... I'll even put out the fancy cutlery and the best china. Hoping I've lived up to my name... - Luke AKA That Helpful Dude http://www.thathelpfuldude.com http://www.thatmarketingdude.com 31