Where Do I Start? – Publishing Your Website

Today we continue our series on the site called “Where to Start?” Where to Start? is a step by step series that helps you build a website from scratch on your own by giving you a variety of options to choose from.

Follow the Series Step by Step:

Now What?

So you’ve spent a few hours working on setting up your new WordPress blog. You’re now (hopefully) more motivated than ever to get your site up and running to help manage your ministry and put some resources online. But there are still some things to do before you’re ready to go.

We’ve put together a quick run through of some things to work on before launching your site. As always, if you have any questions, give us a shout in the comments.

Add Categories: Add the categories for your blog. Remember to keep it neat and add not more than 15-20 categories. This helps to organize your site as your amount of content grows over time.
Add an About Page: An about page is one of the most important pages of a site because readers need to know about the person who’s site they are reading and what the site is about.
Install All In One SEO Pack: Install the latest version of All In One SEO Pack WordPress plugin and optimize your new site from the beginning itself. Remember to visit the plugin’s option page.
Customize Permalink Structure: Choose a good Permalink Structure and stick with it. Here are some examples of good Permalinks: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ /%postname%/ If you change your permalink structure after you have been linked by other sites, those links won’t work anymore. So remember to stick with the Permalink Structure you chose in the beginning. We use the /%postname%/ permastructure here on New Media Ministry, which allows posts to show up as “http://www.newmediaministry.com/nameofthepost”
Create a FeedBurner feed for your site: Login to FeedBurner and create a FeedBurner feed for your new site
Install the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin: The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber
Put a RSS button on your blog: Choose an RSS button and put it on your site linking it to your FeedBurner feed
Start Writing: What’s a website without content? Start writing content for various pages!
Install the Google Sitemaps plugin: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress site which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Download the latest version of the plugin from here.
Add your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools: Add your new site to Google Webmaster Tools and then your sitemap too. Once you add your site, you will be able to find when Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page, web crawl errors, etc.
Set preferred domain: Select your site from your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard and set your preferred domain (with or without www) by going to Tools>Set preferred domain.
Install Akismet plugin: Download and install Akismet plugin to catch comment spam. Akismet has caught 200 spam comments on this site in the last 3 weeks since we launched.
Add a Contact form: Install a plugin that adds a contact form to your blog so that your readers can get in touch with you. We use C Forms WordPress Plugin.
Install Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a great free way to check your site traffic. Signup for a free Google Analytics account, install this plugin, configure it for your site, and then voila, you’ll be able to track who all comes to your site.