How To Get Your WordPress Site Up And Running With The Essential Plugins By Greg Rickard

So you've got your domain name and hosting and have installed WordPress for use as your CMS. You have your "wp-admin" login and are in the Dashboard area.

What next? How do you get this thing up and running as soon as possible?

The first thing to do is delete the sample Page and the sample Post. Just plain old delete them. Click on Pages on the left there in the Dashboard and you'll see the sample page in question. Delete it and repeat the process for Posts. Great.

Next, in the Pages section again, create a new page titled Home and click Publish over there on the right. You can also type My First Page or something like that in the body area, then click Update where the Publish button once was. We will use this as the home page of the site very soon.

Next, click Plugins, Add New. In the search box, type "Tinymce Advanced".

It will come up at or near the top of the results. Install it, find the Settings section of Tinymce, then right down the bottom tick the box that says Stop Removing P and BR (paragraph and line breaks). Save the changes and you're done with that.

The next plugin you'll need is WordPress SEO by Yoast. Search for and install it. You'll see that it appears at the bottom-left of your WordPress dashboard. It will have a heading, SEO. Click that and go to Permalinks.

Under Permalink Settings, tick the top one that says Strip Category Base. Go to the bottom and Save your changes.

Next, go to XML sitemaps in the SEO menu, just above Permalinks where you just were. Tick everything there except for Posts and Pages, Save and you're done.

Next plugin you need is Shareaholic. This is used for putting social media buttons on your site so people can share and like your content in their Facebook Newsfeeds, in their Twitter accounts and so on.

It comes with a fairly easy to follow control section of it's own that gives you lots of options. The plugin is also known as Sexy Bookmarks.

For visually-appealing photo effects, install the Lightbox Plus plugin. There's a bit of a learning curve with it but if you know a bit of HTML it will be very easy and the plugin has it's own help website, as do the others mentioned.

Lightbox is the effect you see on some sites where you click a photo and the screen goes dim, with a full-size photo overlay appearing. Very slick.

It's just a matter of wrapping the img tag with an a href tag to the same image address, but including the rel="lightbox" attribute. For those familiar, it means the image will become a hyperlink, just linking to a Lightboxed larger image.

The image that appears on the page should be smaller than the linked Lightbox image. This can be achieved using the width attribute within the img tag.

Next, go to the Settings menu at bottom-left of the Dashboard, then click Reading.

Under Front Page Displays, select a static page. Click next to the Front Page dropdown box and select Home, the page we created earlier. Save changes.

Next, go to Discussion in Settings. Untick the top three, at least for now, then Save. This will disable comments from site visitors and other spammers. When you are ready to deal with it, you can simply come back and enable those options.

Finally, go to Permalinks under Settings and select Custom Structure. Put the following in the space provided:

/%category%/%postname%/

... exactly the same as that. Save and you are done.

That is a relatively quick and easy way to configure WordPress and have the necessary plugins in place.

When you view your site you will see the Home page you created, which you can now edit as you like.

I would recommend becoming familiar with custom menus as the next step, as it will allow you to control the order of pages in your site menu, using an easy drag-and-drop organizing feature.

Greg Rickard is the owner of http://www.grwebsites.com, an Australia-based service helping small business owners getting a website online for their businesses.
Specializes in WordPress CMS installation and optimization, with links to logo and cartoon mascot designs.

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