When I decided to start a blog I chose Wordpress because of its popularity and wide range of tried and tested plugins. So from within my CPanel at my Hostgator Web Hosting, I installed from the very handy Fantastico range of Web Applications. However the apps in there are not always up to date so after I installed from there I went to Wordpress and got the latest version and overwrote the files using ftp, otherwise an upgrade might be tricky after you’ve installed all your plugins and themes and hacked around the php files.

With a fresh install and a familiarization of admin, I needed to plan how I wanted my blog to look. While checking out some of my favourite blogs I figured out  what was professional and downloaded the ProSense theme developed by Dosh Dosh for a base. Prosense was designed with Google Adsense in mind so I can at least crack on and earn money from ad clicks, if ever.

I wanted a bright design that was easy to read and with a wide right column for future advertising just like i see on the best blogs. I also chose a width suitable for the 1024 screen size that is fast becoming the standard rather than 800 pixels. I stripped what I didn’t want from the code, for example I didnt want the default title and description in my header, so I created a tidy logo image and found a more interesting RSS image.

I hacked around the header and made a navbar and a search form so now it doesnt look like the Prosense original at all. I did a little research and gathered some essential plugins, enough to get the ball rolling.

One thing I wanted was control of my own email subscription list and I had heard about the open source newsletter manager phplist, fortunately there was an impressive plugin by Jesse Heap so rather than use FeedBurner I opted for that and slipped it in the sidebar for everyone to see. Now future subscribers will be directly imported into my own MySQL database and I will be able to manually manage the list quite easily.

I came across the excellent QTranslate Wordpress plugin that will help to present some posts in different languages, for me I have an idea to translate to simple Chinese for the benefit of my friends in China.

Another plugin i was convinced to install was a way to remove the ‘no follow‘ tag in comment links, I guess that will help search engine ranking for readers who want to leave a link back to their own blogs. I think this will encourage comments and as i will be closely moderating my blog I have the choice to delete blatant spam.

Don’t forget to downlaod the excellent Ping Optimizer plugin from MaxBlogPress. Save your blog from getting tagged as a ping spammer everytime you update a post.

That’s about it I have a simple and hopefully effective Wordpress Blog I’m happy with. Now I just need to start writing interesting and informative posts, gulp!

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