WordPress is wildly popular as a blogging platform because it’s endlessly customizable. However, WP can be confusing if you’re not techy, and come to it from a purely type-and-click platform like Blogger or Typepad.
If you’re totally new to WP, here are some tips to smooth your learning curve:
1. Choose a hosting company for your WP blog which offers one-click WordPress installations. Although the DIY WP installation is easy, it does take time, and sometimes your FTP program may corrupt a file, or just miss an important file during the upload. One-click installation means that you’re freed from spending miserable four-hour sessions wondering WHY the installation won’t work this time, when it’s worked smoothly before;
2. Stick with a popular theme – even the default theme, until you’ve mastered posting, editing, creating pages, removing spam, and so on. Although there are many gorgeous WP themes, many of them are time-sinks, because they rarely work precisely as they should without some tinkering;
3. Decide what functionality you want, and look for a plugin which will do it for you. For example, I love SimpleTags for tagging. I usually install it, and then didn’t for this blog because I’m using ecto for posting, which installs tags automatically — then today I installed SimpleTags anyway, because it’s just better at tagging than ecto;
4. Sign up with Technorati if you haven’t already done so. Note: if you put the javascript in the sidebar and can’t get it to work, there’s now an option to stick it in a post, which does work, heaven knows why;
5. Activate the Backup plugin and use it.
So there you go. If you’ve been hesitating about using WordPress, be brave. Try. You’ll be amazed at how much more you can do with WP, and soon you’ll be customizing like a pro.
Technorati Tags: WordPress, WordPress installation, getting started with WordPress
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