First steps in creating a WordPress blog

Creation of a database

You must also create a database (MySQL) on your server, where WordPress will store all the information of your Blog/web through the hosting administration panel.

Once this database has been created and named, you must fill in the user, password, and database name fields in the wp-config-sample.php file of the WordPress file that you previously downloaded, as well as the name of the hosting (localhost by default).

Once modified to include the information about the MySQL database mentioned (respecting the quotes), we remove the sample so that it is “wp-config.php”.

And finally we go to our domain to fill in the web name, access password, etc. and we already have WordPress installed.

Choosing and configuring the WordPress template

Then, you must choose a wordpress template, here you have several options both free as those offered by wordpress, paid or premium.

Personally, I usually use the ones from themeforest since there are a lot of quality assured templates so you don’t have any unforeseen events later on. It is important that you choose this template according to the website or blog you are going to create, since you must not forget that it will be the face of your site and the first impression of users who visit it.

There are a lot of them that are ideal for these times since we find them in Responsive and HTML5 versions.

Once you’ve chosen the template you like, as you see in the image you can either activate one of those available in WordPress itself (just search and activate it) or go to the top where you can install themes and upload the one you downloaded in .zip:

It will depend a bit on the options but normally these are the 3 main ones:

• Widgets: where we will choose the elements that go in the sidebar and footer.
• Menus: here we configure the structure of the menus and their location in the template
• Theme Options: depending on the template chosen we will have some configuration options or others. Normally here we can configure and customize design, content, etc.

As a tip to not make your life more difficult and because time is money, it is advisable to install the template as it appears in the preview to see how it will look on your website and to only have to change some details and options and be faster and easier to configure.

Inside the unzipped folder where you have uploaded the installed template, you will find a folder with the name sample in .xml format, we must import it through tools – import – wordpress.

It is possible that you do not have installed the plugin that allows you to import from wordpress, we activate it and go to it:

Once you have put the WordPress template as it comes out in the example demo, you will only have to modify and adapt it so that everything goes as you want.

Main plugins to install in WordPress

• 404 Redirected: to customize your error pages.
• Some social plugin for your posts such as scrolling-social-sharebar that inserts a sidebar next to all your posts so that your blog users can easily support them. Although if I have to choose one to start with, this is it: Facebook, Twitter & Google+ Social Widgets; simple, basic and without thousands of options to decide (just remember to deactivate an option that comes activated by default so that a link to the plugin creator’s website doesn’t appear in the footer if you don’t want it to).
• kismet: it comes by default in most templates, you just need to activate it and get the key.
• Plugin for the contact page as Contact Form 7.
• Ultimate TinyMCE: to be able to write your entries in a more personalized way with extra options for the text editor.
• WordPress SEO (Yoast) or All In One SEO Pack: to optimize well your WordPress at SEO level with writing of metatags, creation of sitemaps in xml, management of robots.txt, etc.
• A plugin we are author box rel-plugin or similar to insert your author file under the posts you write.
• A plugin such as limit-login-attempts.1.7.1 that limits our attempts to log in to wp-admin, in order to avoid bad drinks and have more security.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP): once you’ve written your first posts, this plugin is very useful since it shows the reader all the articles related to the post you’ve just read.
• Cache: This Plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog and avoids the heavy processing of WordPress PHP scripts.

Contents: Menus and pages

Finally, all that remains is the creation of the contact pages, who we are, home… and the configuration of the top menu (with these pages created previously). In addition, if you have used the sample.xml file to install it as in the example demo, you will also have to clean up all the pages, entries, comments… that come by default from the template.

It is important to note that for the creation of the menu items you can not only add the pages created but also allows you to add custom links and / or categories.

The next step would be to customize the placement of the widgets and configure the sections that we want to appear both in the sidebar and in the footer of our template, as well as any other position that is defined by the template.

In addition, to follow up on the visits and to be able to check the success we are achieving, remember to register it in Google Analytics.

And that’s it! You already have your website or blog ready to be launched into the online world and to start working on its positioning!