I talk alot to people (mostly via Twitter) about many setup issues in WordPress. People seem to install it, and go “now what?”. Judging from this strange behavior, I am assuming people need a little help, so I’ve put together 10 quick tips on what to do next after you’ve installed WordPress. The rest my friends, is down to your creativity.

1) Remove the admin user account

A complete no brainer for me, but you need to do it immediately. Go ahead and create a duplicate administrator user account with your own username and password. Then remove the admin account. Whilst your at it, go ahead and follow these 10 steps to secure your admin section. 

2) Install a Database Backup Plugin

Austin Matzko’s WordPress Database Backup plugin really needs to get installed. This allows you to setup (under the tools menu) regular emailed database backups, or you can go ahead and run ad-hoc ones there and then. A must for any serious blogger!

3) Turn on Permalinks

Permalinks are really good for search engines and users alike. If you don’t know what they are, here’s what they look like:

All they do is simply take away nasty page names and query string like article.php?ID=3434 which mean nothing to the user, and nothing to search engines. If your host allows it (should do), turn them on under Settings -> Permalinks.

4) Add the latest list of Update Services

Under the Settings -> Writing menu there is an “Update Services” section. This allows you to enter a number of services that you would like to auto notify when you publish an article (like Technorati, or Google Reader for example). You can get an up to date list of suggested ones here.

5) Install Web Analytics

If you want to be able to track the huge numbers of visitors that you’re just about to get, then you need some kind of web analytics software. Two I’ll mention here (although there are many!) are Clicky, and Google Analytics. Briefly, Clicky is great if you’re looking for near realtime stats, as well as Feedburner and Twitter integration. Clicky also has an API if you’re interested in that stuff. Google Analytics is also very good, very user friendly, but stats only refresh every 4-5 hours. A better review of the two is here.

6) Setup Feedburner

If you also want to get stats purely on your RSS feeds (as well as many other cool features), you should setup Feedburner to manage your feeds. I won’t go into it here, but integration wise there is a great Feedburner Plugin which makes implementation into WordPress a doddle.

7) Don’t download 100′s of plugins

You know when you goto a myspace page, and it looks like the circus came to town – lots of flashy banners, videos playing all over the place, music too… That is a person who has no control – and you quickly leave! You are also in danger of doing the same by clogging up your blog with tons of useless widgets that add little to no value. Try and restrain yourself from installing the world of plugins available to you!

Add socialise icons to your posts

If you’re serious about promoting your content, and want to make it as easy as possible for your users to do the same, then you need to add social network links to your blog posts. There are many ways you can do this, but a handly little plugin called Sociable can do this for you in a flash! So do it!

9) Write about something worthwhile

This may come as a surprise to some, but actually writing about something interesting and relevant does actually help! Telling readers that your dog did a poop isn’t exactly gonna make them come back, however telling users how you trained your bullterrier on how to poop in the toilet and then flush is probably gonna get you some readership! Try and use your posts to help others.

10) Don’t expect cash

This was a great question I came across on Twitter last week:

Which is better to make money from, Blogger or WordPress?

Yes, I know – pretty good, but a lot of noobies out there actually think this matters. It doesn’t. It’s not about the quality of the technology that displays your content. It’s all about the quality of the content. If you write about nothing interesting, people won’t read it, and you won’t monetise. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Blogger, WordPress or whatever blogging application!

I hope you found these useful, and please feel free to add your own tips below. I love the feedback!

Further Reading…

WordPress For Dummies	WordPress Complete	WordPress Plugin Development

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.