What is Wordpress

If you’re going to start Niche Blogging you’ll find that Wordpress is the way to go. It’s just so flexible that you have no choice but to fall in love with the things you can do with it. The plugins created for it expand its usability 100 fold. The themes range from hideous to “how did they do that?” And the majority of blogs you visit today, are most likely built on it.

Wordpress has created a handy guide for installing Wordpress manually. You can view their guide by clicking here.

Wordpress Themes

Some people say it’s irrelevant others believe it’s essential. I’m one of those people who believe it only helps to have a nice theme. If you wanted to sell the blog in the future the beauty of the blog itself may be the unique selling point.

There are many free Wordpress Themes that you can start with. A simple Google Search for Free Wordpress Themes will bring up some good results.

If you’re using Wordpress 2.7 and above you’ll go to the Appearance tab on the left, if you’re using 2.6.5 and below you’ll go to the Design tab towards the top of the page. Both of these will take you to your theme directory and show you the available themes you have at your disposal.

If you would like to change your theme follow the directions below.

Step 1: First, obtain the theme that you like.

Step 2: After you’ve saved the theme to your hard drive, all you need to do is upload in the ‘wp-content/themes directory of your website.

You can either upload the .zip file of the theme in the ‘wp-content/themes’ directory via the cPanel File Manager  

Or

You can Extract the file on your computer and upload the contents of it into you ‘wp-content/themes’ directory via FTP. I prefer this way since it’s quicker.

Plugins – You Need Them
Plugins are designed to extend the usability of Wordpress to do things it doesn’t normally do. Wordpress.org has a great Plugin Directory and all of them are free.

Installing plugins is the same as installing Wordpress Themes, the only difference is you install the plugins in the ‘wp-content/plugins’ folder instead of the themes folder.

Below are some plugins I hold in high regard.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – No more digging in the FTP, uprade your Wordpress to the latest version by following simple steps. May not be needed if you have WP 2.7

All In One Adsense or Adsense Manager – I use these to insert Adsense within my posts. I like them because you don’t have to insert each ad individually. With a click of your mouse your site can serve ads site wide.

Simple Tags - Gives you complete control of the tags on your website. Has a great auto-tag feature.

Wordpress Admin Bar – Not as useful as it used to be when in the dashboard in 2.7, but when you’re on the site it works great for easy access to features.

Plugin Central – Great for letting you know when plugins are outdated and also for its quick plugin install feature.

WP-SpamFree - An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtually eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingbacks.

WP-Stats - Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com's stat system.

Google XML Sitemaps - Creates a Google Sitemap compliant with the XML-Sitemap of your Wordpress Blog

All In One SEO Pack - Optimizes your Wordpress Blog for Search Engines

HeadSpace2 - HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site.  

SEO Friendly Images - SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes.