Install wordpress
Wordpress needs to be installed via your website hosting company control panel
Ensure CGI is enabled this one piece in the puzzle can stop it from working
Theme
For this example I will be talking about one theme only called ‘painter’ which I have found useful for the task at hand. It has customisable colours and you upload your own header easily.
Tip: Make your header image a PNG file that is 980 x 120 pixels and it will look perfect.
Go to the Wordpress Plugins area and download theme called painter
There is a slight issue with the way menus are displayed, the home page button get repeated twice if you make a page called home and then refer to it as the home page.
To fix this issue do the following:
- open your theme’s header.php file in a plain text editor on your computer (Notepad would be fine)
- make a backup copy, just in case something goes wrong
- find the link anchor tag:
<a href...>Home</a> with the link text "Home" - delete it
- upload the edited file via FTP to your server in the proper directory: wp-content/themes/painter/
Free Theme Directories
freethemelayouts – really good themes and all free
list of 55 free themes – good list by the OpenSourceHunter of lots of different themes from a large variety of sources.
Plugins
These plugins I think are fundamental to most websites and are a good baseline. How to use them is well explained on the Wordpress site that. Follow the links below for instructions on how to install and use them.
creates a contact form that does not reveal your address to spammers
this puts a stats option right on the admin dashboard
- need to have the official wordpress account api for this (the website will be linked to your wordpress.com login if it is used here)
register the website with google analytics
copy the website specific code
use code when activating the plugin
for displaying images in an easy to use gallery which is ofter required by clients
makes life a lot easier when adding images to a post or page
I’ve been building WordPress websites for over a decade, spoken at conferences around the world, and taught countless people how to build and maintain their sites.
I know its a jungle out there finding the right people for website development.
But I’m here to help.
Author Profile – Tony Cosentino
