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Wordpress - A Beginners Guide Part 3 - “Choosing Themes And Plugins”
Posted on June 25, 2008
Filed Under Guides, Plugin Help, Themes |
Ok, so you now have your freshly installed Wordpress Blog sitting there and you get the default Wordpress ‘boring’ blue theme showing up with your standard test post and comment. So now what?
These are the standard things i do whenever i set up a new blog site with Wordpress after a fresh install:
- Find and download a new theme for your site - look for SEO optimized or Adsense Optimized or both, depending on your monetization goals. More on this later.
- Upload the theme file to your server (FTP usually) and extract it into the wp-content/themes/ folder.
- Download your preferred plugins and upload them (FTP) to your hosting account and extract them under the wp-content/plugins/ folder.
- Login to the Admin console (via your domain address followed by /wp-admin) and configure your settings
Finding A Suitable Theme
One of the most important things to Wordpress is finding a great theme to base your site on. One key point which people fail to realise is that the base theme is just that - a BASE theme. Any theme can be modded to the degree that it looks completely unrecognizable. But to save yourself time and effort it is a good idea to choose one with a layout that best matches what you want or need. Then you can make small customizations after that to get it exactly to where you want it to be.
Another key factor when deciding which Wordpress theme to choose as your base theme is monetization and traffic. If you are going to be using Google Adsense on your blog then it will save you time by choosing an ‘Adsense Optimized’ theme. Personally, however, i have found many of these Adsense base themes are not really that good looking or right for me. That’s why it’s not a showstopper if your theme is not Adsense optimized from the beginning, as you can always insert them manually or with a plugin. From my experience i have found that the ‘Prosense’ Wordpress theme is actually very good. It is optimized for Google Adsense to appear in the best locations and to be automatically blended etc. It is also SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimized which is a bonus.
Hack Wordpress is a fantastic blog and an excellent resource for free Wordpress themes which are of a very high standard. I highly recommend checking it out. They have a nice range of Wordpress Theme categories - e.g. 2-column, 3 column, Adsense Optimized, SEO optimized, Premium Wordpress Themes, K2 themes etc.
Another great resource which i can highly recommend is Courtney Tuttle’s blog, which features some stunning SEO-Optimized Wordpress Themes, which are very important if (like me), you are keen to see a lot of traffic coming to your site via the big search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
Finally, a much larger collection (not necessarily better in quality though still great) can be found here at the Wordpress Theme Viewer Site.
Once you have selected your theme, upload it to your wp-content/themes/ folder and activate it via the Admin Site under the DESIGN>THEMES subheading.
Get Some Plugins!
Next, we will need some stock standard plugins such as the following list. I generally install these guys all as a matter of course, without thinking, as they are practically mandatory in my book. All Wordpress Plugins can be downloaded free from here
- Wassup - this plugin provides all the stats you’ll ever need for your site in a fast and efficient set of reports, all customizable. Much quicker than searrching through AWstats or Webalizer Stats on your host, Wassup provides a nice and fast summary all accessed from within your Blog’s Admin Panel.
- Privacy Policy for Adsense - this is a nice Wordpress plugin that was made to combat Google’s controversial recent TOS changes, which forces people to have a ‘Privacy Policy’ page on their site if they are showing Google Adsense ads. This plugin is great because it let’s you automatically create the policy for you and you can sit back and relax
- Some kind of social networking bookmark plugin - there’s a lot of these available and most do pretty much the same thing - i.e. allow you to add a social network bookmarks set of icons after your posts which allow people to add to the likes of Google, StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc - one of my favs is Bookmarkify
- All In One SEO Pack - This Wordpress Plugin is awesome and pretty much mandatory imho. It allows you to set meta tags for your Blog - title, description and keywords. Even if the Wordpress Theme i use as a base template is SEO optimized i still like to use this excellent plugin, which only seems to help the SEO rankings. One of my best-performing blogs uses a heavily modded Prosense theme in conjunction with this plugin and 80% of my traffic comes from search engines, not to mention top five on page one rankings for the keywords it is optimized for.
- Akismet - This comes built-in to a default install of Wordpress 2.5.1 (latest version at time of writing) and is the best spam protection filter plugin out there as far as i’m concerned. It pretty much just works, though the only catch is that you have to ‘activate’ it by registering for free with Wordpress to get the API key it requires for the full version.
There are many other useful plugins and widgets you can use, such as video widgets, image galleries, live chat, event calendars etc. but this list above are the only manadatory ones in my opinion.
To activate the plugins, upload them to your server under the wp-content/plugins/ folder and extract the archives. Then in your Wordpress Admin Panel, go to the PLUGINS tab and you will see your plugins all there in a list. Go through and activate which ones you wish to use and you will then find the configurable options for them in either the SETTINGS tab or as tabs of their own, depending on the plugin.
So, that wraps up this part of the beginner’s guide. Next we will look at customizing your basic theme to how you want it, going from the basics up to more advanced techniques.
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About WPNinja
Hi, i am the Wordpress Ninja. My name is Paul and my goal is to be able to answer everyone's Wordpress questions (for free) and post the best solutions on this blog. So for all questions and issues please post in the Wordpress Ninja Forum
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Why did you choose the “Wassup” stats plugin over the standard “WordPress Stats” plugin?
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Nice post. I have a lot of trouble trying to select the right theme for my sites. I used Prosense for a while but found that I needed more flexibility in the layout but my html skills are severely limited. After much procrastination and reading tons of forums I have started using the Thesis theme and I’d like to get your thoughts on it. To me it seems a lot more flexible because you can change the layout quite easily from the admin area, but I find I still need some help if I want to get my site looking really good.
I started writing the steps I have taken from a beginners perspective to help other beginners set up a Wordpress blog. I would be interested to get your comments. http://www.settingupablog.net/category/steps-to-set-up-your-blog/
Cheers - Richie.
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