With over 5 years of experience with WordPress, the powerful blogging / CMS application used to create millions of websites and blogs around the world, I have seen many, ups, downs, bumps, car jackings, fistacuffs, thrown computers, head bang on walls etc. After just updating my site for, hmm… the 8th time?, I’ve decided to write a post that will hopefully help some people out in starting a new site with WordPress.

1) Find a good theme

Finding a good theme is hard.  Their are tons of them.  All over the internet.  The reason I say this is because, if I would have found a good theme I liked from the start I probably wouldn’t have changed it so many times and ran into the many problems I’m about to list below.  Don’t download themes from places you don’t know or trust.  Believe it or not there are themes out there that will do bad things in many different ways.  I have not experienced this but I’ve heard stories, so just be careful.

2) Don’t hack the theme

If your like me you’ll probably end up doing this anyway, but I’ve lost data due to poor backup practices. I’ve overwritten previous files in the wp-content directory and that isn’t fun.  Hacking themes isn’t really that big a deal if you know what your doing, but just make sure you backup your stuff first.  If you don’t know what your doing just stay away from this, you’ll probably end up becoming “OH: he tosses the computer across the room” and starting from scratch again.  Besides if you find a good theme you probably won’t need to hack anything.  It will also be less hassle when you want to upgrade the theme.

3) Use permalinks!!!

I’ve seen so many people start a blog, and then down the road realize their uri’s could be way prettier and help out seo immensely.  They switch to use permalinks then see all their incoming links 404 with page not found.  This results in having to use the old ugly way: ?page_id=9 instead of the better: /2009/12/9/some-long-title-permalink-with-keywords.  I could be wrong on this in that WordPress may have upped the ante and is now finding_by_id_or_permalink.  Either way just do it, it’s easy. Settings -> Permalinks in the Admin panel.

4) Categories are for categories

When I started my first WordPress site, I created hundreds of categories, using them like tags mostly because I didn’t really understand the whole category tag thing.  Well when I wanted to use categories for my main navigation, I ran into huge problems.  Categories can or don’t have to be used for navigation but in the future you may find a cool theme that uses nifty drop down menus of your categories, so just use categories for categories.  If  you have a site that’s all about junk food, then your categories could be: chocolate, drinks, cookies, ice cream and chips.  Try and limit the number of categories to under 10.  Plan your site out and think of the future growth of your site.  Can all posts and future posts fit into these categories?  If you can’t keep it under 10 then use parent categories.

5) Tags are for tags

Tags are pretty much for breaking down your content even more than categories. You can go all out here, add what ever you want, keeping in mind you what to use tags to relate to what your post is about. That way if you have say 3 posts that are all relative to 1 thing, you can add a specific tag to each of those posts and users can find all 3 of your posts that are similar on one page.

6) Cache your site

WordPress by default is fairly fast and responsive, but if your on a shared server, even a private server without much memory your site could end up doing some pretty annoying things if you have a traffic spike.  WordPress is very customizable and you can add tons of different plugins, so go find a good caching plugin to serve up static content instead of having to do database calls every request.  WP Super Cache is an example of a very good caching plugin.  There are lots of others so find one that suits your needs.

7) Backup your Database

I’ve ruined a few sites by not backing up the database, then upgrading or doing something stupid and loosing lots or all the data within.  There has been many similar stories of people just being dumb or doing work at 3am when they shouldn’t have and clicking the wrong button.  Many hosts allow you to set this up right in your panel, or if your a bit tech savy you can create a crontab to hit a command to do the dirty work.  You can also just download a sql dump every so often.  I currently use the method describe on my automate mysql backups post.

8) Setup comment moderation

With all the crap that goes on now a days with spamming etc, I strongly suggest setting up at least: Comment author must have a previously approved comment or even: An administrator must always approve the comment. This way you will never get spammed with crap content from bots or real people, and google won’t blacklist your site for having inappropriate content on it.

9) Use Viviti!

If your not into WordPress and can’t get your head around it for what ever reason, there are other sweet options out there. Out of the box type options that will just work with no fudging, pixel pushing, etc.  Just for Jerrett’s amusement: Viviti is one of them.  Why is it so rad?  Well it just works… out of the box. You can easily customize it, you can do pretty much anything with it, and it’s built with the Ruby on Rails framework (me likes).  Basically you don’t really need to worry about any of the things mentioned above.  So give it a shot, It’s definitely worth a try.