Wordpress: How To Build Your Niche Site Using Wordpress Blog Software

If you're planning to use your Wordpress site for niche marketing, you need to set it up on your own domain. Free wordpress blogs are severely limited in how much marketing you can do on them.

The two things you need before you can install Wordpress are a domain name and web hosting.

Choose a domain name which reflects the topic of your site and ideally doesn't contain hyphens or underscores. For a marketing site, .com is the best extension but you can use .net if you must, or your country's extension. Use services like Nameboy or Makewords to come up with names and find out if they are already taken. You should be able to register a .com or .net domain name for a year for less than $10.

Choosing a Wordpress Host
Wordpress itself recommends several hosting services: Dreamhost, AN Hosting, Host I Can, BlueHost, MediaTemple and Laughing Squid. Of these, comparing similar-priced plans, Laughing Squid has much less storage space than others. Media Temple is more expensive but is more high-powered. Dreamhost, Bluehost and Host I Can have one-click installs for Wordpress, which is definitely to be desired if you're a non-techy. Apart from these, you're looking for a host which has cPanel and Fantastico for that one-click install, and you should be able to find something for less than $10/month. Sometimes you can find a hosting service which includes a free domain name, which might be a good deal for you.

Once you have your domain name bought and your hosting set up, you need to link the domain name to the host. That means taking the DNS server names which your new hosting service should have sent you in an email, and plugging them into the right place in your domain name account management screen. These are all slightly different, but if you look for DNS settings that should get you to the right place.

Assuming you've picked a host with cPanel and fantastico, this is the really easy bit. Log onto your cPanel using the URL, username and password that your host sent you. Click on the Fantastico icon. Choose Wordpress under Blogs in the list of supported software. Follow the instructions. Now you have a basic installation of Wordpress ready to go.

You'll need to tweak it, though. The default "theme" (screen colors, layout and design) is pretty uninspiring. However, there are thousands (literally) of free themes out there that you can download and use to make your pages look as spiffy as you like. There are also premium (for pay) themes, or you can get a custom theme made just for you. I suggest trying several free themes first to get the feel of what a theme can do for you and what you'd want in a custom one. A Google search for "free wordpress theme" will get you plenty of sources for themes.

To install a theme, you need to download it from the site where you find it onto your own computer, unzip it into its own folder, then upload the folder to the wp-content/themes folder on your new site. You can do that using the file manager within cPanel, or using FTP software like Fielzilla or FireFTP (for Foxfire). Then you go into your Wordpress admin dashboard (go to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ ), click on Design in the top menu, and you'll see your new theme below. Click on it to use it.

There are many possible changes to the default settings you can make, but one very important one for getting your pages to appear in Google is to set the "permalinks". Go to your Wordpress dashboard again, and click on 'settings" at the right hand side. Then choose "permalinks" from the horizontal menu below the main bar menu. Click on the "custom structure" radio button and put this in the box beside it:
/%category%/%postname%/
Don't forget to click on "Save Changes" at the bottom!

Another important setup task is to install and activate plugins. There are thousands of these, performing many different tasks. The ones I recommend as most important are Headspace2 (for SEO), and WP Google Analytics (to install tracking). These are installed in a very similar way to themes: download the plugin, unzip it, upload the plugin folder to wp-content/plugins, then go to Plugins (next to Settings in your dashboard screen) and activate it.

There are two kinds of content-container on your Wordpress site - pages and posts.

Posts are the regular, dated, blog-type chunks of text - normally you have several on the home page, with the most recent first. To create a post, go to Write, and the screen defaults to Write Post. Create your post, then click the Publish button. See and edit your existing posts under Manage.

Pages are more like standard static website pages. Create a page by going to Write then choosing Page instead of Post. Create your page, then click Publish.

You can set a static page to be your home page. First, create the page, then go to Settings/Reading: at the top under "Front Page Displays" set the radio button to "A Static Page" then choose your page to be the front page.

In many themes, there's a default horizontal menu which lists your Pages, and a vertical one in a sidebar listing your posts. Some themes put pages and posts in the sidebar. You can change what appears in your sidebar by going to Design/Widgets.

Adding pictures

At the top of the post (or page) editor there's an "Add Media" section which allows you to add pictures and other media. You can specify size and position once you've uploaded the picture file.

Adding Links

Use the chain-link icon on the editor toolbar to add a link to another site. Highlight the text you want to turn into a link, click the chain link button, then enter the URL of the page you want to link to.

Changing text font, size and color

Wordpress uses CSS (Cascading style sheets) to control text fonts, sizes and colors over your whole site. If you want to change ALL your headings to be blue 99 point script, you'd want to do that in the CSS stylesheet rather than case-by-case. However, if you just want to do a minor font color tweak somewhere, click the "kitchen sink" icon on the editor toolbar (it's the one on the far right with several rows of dots on) and you'll get a whole extra toolbar. It lets you change the style of your text to any of the available stylesheet styles, change the text color, erase existing formatting, insert special symbols, and indent paragraphs.

Importing Text From MS Word

If you copy and paste text directly from MS Word into a page or post you'll get a horrible mess. Just don't do it. Use the "Paste From Word" button on the Kitchen Sink toolbar (the clipboard icon with W on it) and your formatting will get transferred much more reliably.