Setting Up A New WordPress Blog
Matthew and I have been cooking a few plans for new ventures, and we’ve quietly launched the first of these today. It’s an Alternative Energy blog called altnrg. We think it’s a good niche to play in, but it’s a bit of an experiment. There is good news-flow, and good click-through rates, but you still need an awful lot of those clicks to make it worth while. We’ll just see how it goes.
Installing a new Wordpress blog is no more than a few clicks away our Bluehost webhosting account. From then on, I always think it’s going to take half-an-hour to get everything ready, and in fact I end up tinkering until the wee hours.
You’ll notice that the design is a development of the blog relations theme. In keeping with most ad-driven blogs, it has a double sidebar on the right. We noticed at Storynory that people click far more on this side.
I wanted to get latest posts, search, and subscribe button clearly above the fold. The comments link is at the top of the post to encourage people to take part.
It relies on tags and a tag cloud rather than categories, as I think these are better for technorati searches, and you can have more of them. The cloud gives a quick overview of what the blog is about.
I’ve installed the latest Ajax stuff, including the great Extended Live Archive and Ajax Comments. Tags are by Ultimate Tag Warrior. For SEO I consider the sitemaps plugin essential (together with Webmaster tools) and I track stats with Analytics. Of course we need a Feedburner account, and have to make sure that the header template directs people to the feedburner feed.
All in all, it’s never a five minute job to optimise a new WordPress blog.
5. December 2006 at 23:58
It would help if we knew why a Feedburner account was an “of course”.
6. December 2006 at 09:34
Lorelle, You are right “of course” was a bit lazy. But feedburner helps you in many ways. The feed looks nice and far less offputting to new-comers. It keeps track of how many subscribers you have - which is nice to know. It gives you a range of publicity tools. And if you change the URL of your blog, people don’t have to re-subsribe.
13. December 2006 at 23:42
I have been using Bluehost for a testing account at work. They seem really slow - is it just me? Why do people recommend them for Wordpress?
13. December 2006 at 23:43
Woah - I only just noticed the AJAX comment tool on this blog - AWESOME! I totally didn’t read it in the post the first time but am now off there to get it for my parrott blog! WOHOO!
14. December 2006 at 15:36
Parrott, Glad you like the AJAX commenting.
Bluehost emailed customers recently to say they’ve got bigger “pipes” and sites should load faster. I think it’s not bad now.
People recommend it for WordPress because it has one click installation, as well as other stuff you need, like mod-rewrite. Dreamhost is very similar.
2. February 2008 at 13:49
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