Last time we covered setting up your settings and finding a theme. I hope you have all found a theme you like and is relevant to your blog topic. I had a tough time finding just what I wanted for the bike blog, but I found something that will work for now. I may keep an eye out for the theme I had in mind, but couldn’t find when I actually went looking for it. ** note to self… self when you see a theme you like download it right then, at the very least ~ bookmark the page for later. 
Now I have a theme all zipped up sitting in my wordpress/themes folder on my desktop. Recently wordpress has made some changes that will make uploading this theme SUPER easy!!
Let’s log in to our sites and find the “appearance” category in the sidebar, click the title so it opens up all the options for us to see.
Click on the add new themes link. This will open up a world of possibilities for you ~ however, you don’t have to use many of them. However, if at some point you want to get fancy you can learn how to use all the extras that are now provided. I want to add at this point ~ a theme is important to the first impression of your blog, but messing with your theme and how it looks is NOT a money making activity. You can have an ugly as hell site and STILL make tons and tons of money. Do NOT spend a ton of time tweaking your theme and the look of your site. really. I mean it.
The piece we need is at the very top. This is a relatively new feature to wordpress, you can search for themes here, you can also upload your theme here as well.
To upload our selected theme (upload simply means adding it to our options to choose from our blog) we want to click on the upload link.
We’ve saved our theme in the zip format it was in when we downloaded it. Now we simply use the browse button to look on our desktop (or wherever you saved it) for our wordpress/themes folder (or whatever you called it) and pick the theme we want wordpress to upload for us.
Here’s a quick video where I actually upload my theme for the mountain bike site.
That’s all there is to installing your theme. You have it really easy ~ wordpress has made it super simple to upload your theme, no more FTP at this stage ~ don’t worry ~ you’ll get to learn it later.
Let’s talk about plugins.
Plugins are little programs that allow your blog to do things for you automatically. These plugins are free and will give you greater functionality on your blog. There is a plugin for just about anything and everything you can think of. We’re not going to go crazy with the plugins though ~ for this type of site we only need a few. Here’s the plugins I run on a niche blog type site like this one.
1. all in one seo This plugin gives you opportunities to seriously optimize, not only your whole site, but each post on your site for your keywords. Very easy to use, but necessary.
2. simple link cloaker This plugin will allow you to cloak your affiliate links so they look like regular site links. This is a very simple plugin but it serves our purposes VERY well.
3. Google sitemap This plugin will automatically generate a sitemap for your site and notify the major search engines. The dowload link is part way down the page. Make sure you download the recommended one for wordpress 2.1 or better.
4. tweet meme This plugin will put a button on your posts that allow people to share your posts on twitter very easily. This is a nice way to let others help you drive traffic to your site. If you look at the top of this post ~ it says retweet (hopefully there’s a number there because someone has retweeted this post lol) that’s the tweetmeme plugin in action.
5. all in one adsense/yahoo This plugin makes it very easy to customize and include adsense ads or ads from yahoo’s ad network on your site. We will be downloading this one now ~ but we’re NOT activating it yet. You don’t want to put adsense ads on your site until later. really. yes, I’m serious.
6. Yet another related posts This plugin automatically lists related posts at the end of your post to keep people moving through your site.
The process for plugins is the same as for themes. Go to your wordpress folder and inside create a “plugin” folder. Then go to each site, hit the download button for the plugin and choose the plugin folder to save it in.
Once you’ve got them all saved you can upload them to your site. All you’re going to have to do is go to the plugin category in your dashboard area.
Click on plugins to open up your options. And then click add new to get started. From here you can choose to upload your plugins by clicking the “upload” link, just like at the theme area.
Now you want to use the browse button and find your plugin folder. Upload one plugin at a time. So find the plugin click open, and then click install now in the dashboard. It will open and get the plugin ready to activate. You can go ahead and activate all but the adsense one, but go ahead and upload it. If you activate it now you will have a big blank square show up in your posts ~ which looks crazy and doesn’t do you any good. So just leave it unactivated until we’re ready to use it.
When you install the SEO plugin you will get a big red stripe at the top of your dashboard that it needs to be configured ~ we’re gonna do that on Monday. For now just get them all installed and activated (except the adsense one). We’ll do all the configuring next time.
You’ll notice there are a couple plugins already in dashboard when you get there. akismet and hello dolly. Hello dolly we are not going to use, but we are going to use akismet. This is one of the BEST plugins to manage spam.
To make it work however, you’re going to have to enter a code. It’s called an API key. It’s free and you can get it from wordpress.com (yes, wordpress.com) To get it you will have to have an account at wordpress.com ~ if you don’t have an account there make one, if you do you already have an API key and we’ll get it next time to activate your akistmet plugin.
Tasks for the weekend:
1. install and activate your theme
2. install and activate your plugins (except the adsense one)
3. sign up for an account at wordpress.com so we can get your API key on monday.
If you have any questions about the process, or plugins feel free to ask them in the comments section. Please remember that plugins and blog set up is a really personal thing ~ it can be done a million different ways, and everyone has their own favorite plugins and way to set up a blog/site. I’m not saying you can ONLY use these plugins. I’m just saying this is my way. You can certainly, over time, create your own way, and figure out what you like best, for now this is a great place to start.
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Hi Jackie,
I'm just building my first website and strugging with it. Thank you for sharing so much information for free.
My question is: do I have to re-install the settings and plugins everytime I change the theme for the same domain name? I know I have to re-install stat counter each time I change the theme.
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