How to Create a Wordpress Website - First Steps

I started using Wordpress websites last year and to be honest to start off with I did not get on well with them. I guess it was just the fact that I was not familiar with how they worked and I didn't find them to be that user friendly. After some time of using other people's wordpress websites and now setting up my own I have started to get to grips with them.

I by no means profess to being an expert at Wordpress websites (although I thought I had a good foundation, having worked as a Sharepoint website expert previously) but I wanted to show you what I had learnt about setting up a Wordpress website and what I do each time I set a website up so that firstly, any beginners might get a few tips that they didn't know and secondly, anyone who is an expert can correct me and tell me if I am doing something wrong or missing something!

Although Wordpress was really set up as a blogging platform, it is also great to use for setting up a standard websites as you don't have to design the whole site from scratch, there are lots of plugins that can do whatever you want them to do which saves you a whole lot of time if you want to start a website.

I currently have around a dozen Wordpress websites set up with more in the pipeline and am using them for earning extra online income, primarily with adsense and Amazon.

I have all of my Wordpress sites hosted by Hostgator which has a great plan for unlimited hosting so that you can have as many wordpress sites as you want to hosted on one account. Find out more info on this and get discount codes at my Unlimited WordPress website. Other hosting providers can also set up Wordpress hosting for you but this seems to be the best one that I have found and was also recommended to me by an SEO expert.

So, let's say that you have your website set up and have installed Wordpress on it, so if you are using Hostgator then you will have the theme Twenty Eleven used on your website.

The first thing that I will do with my website is to choose a suitable theme. If you go into the Wordpress admin console and select themes then you will get a choice of a lot of free themes that you can choose to use for your website. Choice of a Wordpress theme may depend on the layout - how many columns do you want and in which position? Or it may depend on the look of the website - you can search the themes by colour, description and layout amongst other things.

If you don't like any of the free themes that you see then you can buy custom themes or get someone to build one for you. once you have installed a theme you can also customise the style sheet and hence the appearance yourself.

Plugins are the things that make Wordpress sites do what you want them to do - there is pretty much a plugin for anything and most of them are free. There are many different plugins for each type of thing that I am trying to do but these are the ones that I have found suit my needs best. The plugins that I will install as soon as I set up my Wordpress website are as follows:

• Wordpress SEO - this is a key plugin if you want to get more traffic to your website. This plugin ensures you maximise the SEO and create all the correct metadata for each of your pages.
• Advertising Manager - this is just one of the plugins that will add Google Adsense blocks to your site and each one has a different way of installing the ads. I have found this one to be my preferred one although I have used another one on one of my sites that automatically adds the ads to each post and am trying that out - so maybe try a few out and see which one suits you best.
• Easy Privacy Policy - this adds a privacy Policy page to your website which you will need if you are displaying adsense or selling affiliate products. Quick and easy as it says!
• WP Amazon associate - again there are a few Amazon plugins that you can use. This one can customise the item you display to the location of the viewer (providing that product is available in their location) so is pretty useful.
• Google XML Sitemaps - creates a sitemap that Google recognises and that can be added to the Webmaster tools.
• Simple 301 Redirects - used so that affiliate links are not shown on each page but are instead on a 301 redirect from a web page (apparently Google recognises affiliate links and does not like them).
• YouTube Embed - allows you to embed YouTube videos in your website if required.

In addition to these I may use other plugins that are specific to each site but these are my staple ones that I will pretty much always use.

One thing that I usually do is to change the Wordpress website so that it looks less like a blog. I prefer to have a static home page with the 'blog' entries on another page so to do this I first add two new pages to the site - one called 'Home' and one called 'news' (or something similar). Then I go to Settings, Reading and change the home page to be a static one (Home) and the 'posts' page to be 'news' - in this way I can have plain text on the home page.

Once I have done this will create all of my pages (bearing in mind I will have already done the research on my keywords and so I will know what I want to call the pages) and will already have the content created that I can just insert into the pages. Whilst creating all the pages I will also fill in all the SEO information on them.

Some of the extra steps I will take when creating my Wordpress site are:

• Install Google Analytics
• Change the admin password that was automatically generated
• Make sure in settings the site is set with the www in the site URL
• Add the site to Google webmaster tools and register the XML file
• Submit the site to Google and Bing
• Start working on lots of backlinking for my site

You can check out my profile for ideas on where to get good backlinks for your sites.

So far I am happy with the way my Wordpress websites are going. Within 2 months one of my sites has reached page 1 of Google (positions 3 and 4) and is getting some good traffic. The others have increasing traffic and a bit more competition to overcome! One thing I think is key is to get the right URL - in particular a .com if you can - and I focus on the URL as the first thing before I set up a site.