Yigber’s Online Adventures

After installing Wordpress, with or without fantastico, go through this checklist.

This is relevant to wordpress-2.3 and maybe to future versions.

1. Reset password for admin.
2. Choose theme - note that each time you change the theme, you’ll need to redo the mods for Feedburner stats.
3. Upload theme heading picture.
4. Put your personal favicon.ico in the blog root dir.  This may help.
5. Update blogroll.  At least chuck out the default and put a link to mine…
6. Update about page.
7. Throw first default post and comment.
8. SEO the blog - the one and most important thing is to change the ‘post name pattern’ so that your post title will appear in the URL thus improving ranking.  Go to Options | Permalinks and under Custom type: /%postname%/
9. Change title and tagline to something other than default under Options | General.
10. Change default comment policy under Options | Discussion: remove “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” and “Force admin approval” of comments if akismet not active.
11. Add auto ping to Technorati http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping  in addition to the pingomatic engine, under Options | Writing | Update Services
12. Upload  plugins:
    1. tinymce advanced
    2. sitemap
    3. video
    4. feedburner
    5. stats
    6. akismet
    7. cache
    8. table
13. Activate and configure plug-ins under the Plugins tab.
14. Configure the Plugins under Options | Plugins and under Options | Manage.
15. Setup feedburner stats for advanced analytics of your blog.  This is done through your feedburner account.  Redo this each time you change the theme.
16. Setup additional users if needed under Options | Users