Complete Wordpress Handbook for your Small Business:

Reasons to Install for your business site

 

So you've heard about Wordpress and are interested in either moving your current small business website over to its platform, or are ready to take advantage of its blogging and maintenance capabilities on a new site of yours.

 

Using Wordpress and this handbook we will walk you through the complete process of starting  your companies site and customizing the details from start to finish.

 

Some of the reasons so many small business owners are moving their sites over to wordpress include:

 

• Ease of use:

Most people don’t want to spend evenings working on their website, or are tired of paying their web designer a monthly fee.  Wordpress is created so that people with no programming skills can make text and image changes easily, and its extensive plugin system allows you to create a very powerful website without the need to hire a web developer.

 

• Its Price:

As an Open Source application Wordpress will always be free to use for your companies site.  This, in combination with removing your web developer fees can result in large savings over time for you and your business.

 

• Customer contacts:

Enaging your customer is now a core part of business today.  Wordpress allows for customer participation through a built in commenting system, in addition to having plugins and integrations for every social media platform around including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

 

• Being able to customize it:

There are literally thousands of plugins, themes, tutorials and related articles describing the ways to optimize Wordpress to suit your companies need.  It has a large community to help solve issues and is growing larger all the time as seen in this google trends chart.

 

Are you still deciding between using a hosted wordpress.com or typepad/blogger/blogspot service?

 

Benefits over other hosted Web Platforms:

 

There are many arguments on the web over the benefits of hosted vs non hosted platforms (ie: Wordpress.com/Typepad/Blogger vs Wordpress.org).  The bottom line is moving forward you will want to own your brand (Why would you want your companies site to have .blogger or .wordpress or any another domain in your company address?), and you will need the the flexibility and customizizations that your hosted blogging platform just can't provide.

Here are a few ways businesses are using Wordpress in the Wild:

 

More examples can be found in the Wordpress Businesss Showcase

 

Resources

 

-Wordpress.org

The main development site, get documentation, download plugins, etc.

 

-Smashing Magazine: Wordpress Developers Toolbox:
An aggregate of Wordpress resources and development tools.

-Delicious: Wordpress Links
Complete list of bookmarked Wordpress resources.

 

-Wordpress Themes

Handbook section covering themes.

 

-Wordpress Plugins

Handbook section covering the top 10 Wordpress plugins to install for your companies site.

 

 

CC Image Peregrino Will Reign

 

We will now move on to the process of actually installing and setting up your Wordpress site.  Choosing a host and one click installations are covered in Step 1 of this handbook.

 

 

Step 1: Pick Hosting

 

Hosting and installation go hand in hand with your Wordpress business site.  There is usually no need to do a manual install of your site as many hosting providers will provide one click installations for you.

 

I have had good luck with Hostmonster, for many small business sites, they offer affordable rates ($7.00/mo) and provide a free domain and a decent amount of bandwidth with your registration.

 

 

To Install WordPress after signing up:

1. Signup for your Hostmonster or other hosting provider account.

2. Log into your control panel
3. Select 'Fantastico' from the 'Scripts & Stats' section
4. Find the section in Fantastico called 'Blogs' and select 'WordPress' -- a WordPress information screen will load
5. Place your mouse over the bold text 'New Installation' and click the link
6. Choose your domain and proceed with the prompts given by Fantastico to complete the installation.

 

This will populate the default files and databases for a brand new installation of WordPress on any domain attached to your account which you specify.

 

Note: Write down your database information, username, and password for future reference.

 

Are you interested in setting up a custom email addreses for your company ie: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ?  We will review that in the Modification section of the handbook

 

We will now move onto the step number 2: Setting up your domain name.

 

 

Step 2: Update Domain

 

Domain Pointing:

 

If you already have a domain name registered you need to point your domain to your new name servers (DNS) on your hosting environment.

 

If you need a domain in addition to the one provided by your hosting provider. Godaddy usually has some coupon codes for affordable $6.99 domains.

 

Instructions to change your DNS using Godaddy as an example:

 

1. Create Godaddy account or other domain registrar.

2. Log in to your account.

2. Click on "My Domains"

3. Select the name servers or DNS servers

4. Type in the new domain servers.

5. If you are using Hostmonster your DNS servers will need to be updated to NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM & NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM

 

 

After you have submitted the updates your domain name will now be pointed to your new web host. It takes between 2-48 hours for the site to propagate across all of the web's servers. Once propagated you will be able to see your default site on your domain.

 

We are now ready to move onto Step 3:  Site Administration.

 

Step 3: Admin

 

Once your domain and hosting is setup you can now login to your Wordpress backend.  This is where you will make all of your posts and manage your site from.

 

1.In your browser go to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

2.Enter your WordPress Dashboard Login username and passsword that you just set up in Step 1 during the Fantastico Wordpress installation.

3.  You should now be redirected to your admin dashboard.

4.  You can now take a short tour of the dashboard settings.

 

The admin panel contains the following options:

 

-Top of the page:
At the top of the page you should see the name of your site and a "Visit Site" link.  Feel free to visit the live site to see what you will be customizing during later steps in the handbook.

-Posts:
Posts are the entries that display in reverse chronological order on your home page. In contrast to pages, posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site's RSS feed. Additional Info

-Media:
This link is to the media manager where you can control the images, video, recordings, and files, you upload and use in your blog. Additional Info.

-Links:

WordPress allows you to store a set of external links.  These links can be put into categories, your sidebar, imported, and exported to your site. Additional Info

-Pages:

Pages are used for content such as "About" "Contact Us" etc. They live outside of the normal date ordering system, and are used to present information about your company that is not in blog format.  Additional Information.

-Comments:

The area where you can modify or delete the comments left on your posts.

-Appearance:

Where you pick your default theme, control your site widgets and edit your style.css and other template files.

-Plugins:

Your site plugin manager, where you can activate and control settings for each.

-Users:

This area allows you to add, change, or delete, your site's users. In addition, you can search for users and control their administration privileges.  Additional Information.

-Tools:

The Tools SubPanel allows you to use Google Gears to make WordPress faster. This is also where you control the options for select plugin modifications.

-Settings:

The area where you configure some basic settings for your busines site, such as the title, tagline, time zone, and admin email address.

 

 

 

That's it, Simple right?  You are now logged into the backend and familiarized yourself with your new companies website.  We will now move onto step 4:  Finding and installing a custom Wordpress theme to fit your business needs.

Step 4: Pick a Theme

 

 

In this step you will choose the overall look of your website and blog. There are many free WordPress themes, all of the which can be customized with different logos, colors, and fonts to match your companies branding.

 

I recommended selecting one that has the general structure you are looking for (IE: 1 column, vs 3 column) as well as a navigation and menu structure that fit your needs.  All of the rest of the visual elements can be easily modified later on and is something we cover in the modification section of the handbook

 

Here are a few options and inspirations to help you choose your theme:

 

Theme Galleries:

 

-WP Theme Viewer

The main Wordpress.org Theme Directory viewer.

-WeLoveWordpress

One of the largest Wordpress Theme galleries out there.

-WPcube

Generally a good but smaller selection of themes found here.

-SixRevisions: 25 Outstanding Wordpress Designs

-Smashing Magazine: 100 Amazing Wordpress Themes

-SixRevisions: 50 Beautiful Wordpress Themes

 

Free Themes:

 

-Smashing Magazine: 100 Amazing Wordpress Themes

-Hongkiet: 41 Great looking Wordpress Themes

-45 Free Grid Wordpress Themes

-WPCrowd: 100 Best Free Wordpress Themes

 

Premium Themes:

 

Premium themes have become a big industry in the Wordpress world, and in my opinion they are well worth the little money that they charge (Generally between $10-$80).  You usually get advanced navigation, javascript effects and quality graphics with these themes.

 

Picking a premium theme also generally results in fewer modifications that you need to do yourself in order for your business site to look professional, saving you time in long run.

 

My favorite of the premium theme sites is ThemeForest.  This is because they are a marketplace for other designers, offering a large selection of designs and customer reviews are available on almost all of their themes.

 

 

Recommended Business Themes:

 

We have gone ahead and looked through the available themes and think these could work well in a small business setting.  Click on the specific images to be taken to live preview and to download the Wordpress files.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 5: Installation

 

Since you have obtained a new theme to use as the basis your companies site, use the following steps to upload and activate the theme on your live site:

 

1. Download the theme that you like the best from one of our recommendations. Save the folder to your Desktop.
2. Open the Zipped Folder and choose “Extract All Files”, save this extracted folder to your Desktop.
3. Download and open FileZilla
4. Click on File -> Site Manager, and then on New Site.

5. If you have an FTP account setup continue onto the next step.  If you need to setup an FTP account for your site follow these instructions.

6. Enter your FTP information into the Filezilla account:  Host = ftp.yourdomain.com >>  ServerType = FTP.  >> Logon Type: Normal  >>  Username and Password: = Enter FTP account information from step 5 >> Connect.
7. Once the connection to your server is made, click on folders: public_html >> wp-content >> themes.
8. In the left column in Filezilla (representing your desktop) you will now browse to where you saved your newly downloaded theme.  Drag the theme folder over to the right hand column. Placing it into the “Themes” folder on your server.
9. You can now login to your WordPress Dashboard to make this theme the default, this can be done by going to the URL  http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin, and filling in your admin login information.
10. Once in your companies Wordpress backend click on “Appearance” >> “Themes”
11. You should see a thumbnail image of the theme you just uploaded, click on the thumbnail image to activate the theme and to make it live on your site.

12.  Refresh your website url to see the new theme in action.

 

 

Structure

 

Theme Templates

Located in the backend of your Wordpress site under Appearance >> Editor, you will be able to browse and edit your templates Theme files.  Each template is a separate PHP file inside the theme’s directory, more than likely you will not need to touch the majority of templates during your theme customizations (Mainly style.css, header, footer and index.php) but it is a good thing to be familiar with their function.

 

Here are the standard templates:

* 404 Template = 404.php – You can create a custom 404 page (Page Not Found) template.
* Archive Template = archive.php
* Archive Index Page = archives.php
* Comments Template = comments.php – This template defines how comments look under individual posts on the “Post Template”.
* Footer Template = footer.php – HTML that is placed at the bottom of each page.
* Header Template = header.php – HTML that is placed at the top of each page, usually has the <head> section in it.
* Links = links.php
* Main Template = index.php – This is the “home” page of your site.
* Page Template = page.php – Used for single pages, instead of blog posts. Your “About” page uses this template.
* Popup Comments Template = comments-popup.php
* Post Template = single.php – This is where you customize pages that display single posts.
* Search Form = searchform.php
* Search Template = search.php
* Sidebar Template = sidebar.php – Usually the right hand side bar of the page. Some themes have several sidebars so you could see mutliple sidebar.php files.
* Stylesheet = style.css – Where your themes visual styling or cascading style sheets (CSS) reside. It also contains the name and description of the theme. You must always have this file with the name and description of your theme.

 

 

Congratulations! You have the start of your new business site up and running, we will now move onto Step 6:  Reviewing the best Wordpress plugins to install for your business.

 

Step 6: Add plugins

 

The sheer diversity and quality of plugins built for Wordpress is one of the major reasons for the projects success. Most can be modified to fit your exact project needs.  The plugins range from Twitter integrations to others designed specifically to keep spam comments away from your company site and everything in between.

 

Wordpress keeps their own directory of plugins from where you can check user reviews and read instructions.

 

 

Here are some of my Top 10 Wordpress plugins that I think small business owners should have installed on all their sites.

 

Top 10 Plugins

 

Top 10 Small Business Wordpress Plugins:

 

• Wordpress Database Backup

This plugin can be set to automatically email you a backup of your Wordpress database on a daily or weekly basis.  Its one less thing to remember and a general time and sanity saver in case something goes wrong on your site.

• All in One SEO pack
  

This plugin allows you to adjust your page titles, control your URL structure and just about everything else you can think of to help optimize your site for the search engines.

• Google XML Sitemap
  

Automatically create a XML Google compliant sitemap with this plugin, updates itself after every post or page you create.

• Nextgen Gallery
  

A sleek gallery plugin that allows you to feature your businesses images across your site. Includes automatic enlargement affects.

• Recaptcha
  

Defeat spam in its tracks.  A time saver in that it saves you from administrating all of the worthless comments that will make it onto your site.

• WP Super Cache
  

This plugin will speed up your site for your end users by caching your dynamic Wordpress content.

• Google Analytics
  

Allows you to easily install the proper tracking code for Google's free analytics program.  Track who visits your site, where they are from and how long they stay.  A must have for any business wanting to improve conversion rates and customer experience.

• Popularity Contest
  

This plugin will determine which of your content is the most popular. This can then be displayed on your site to drive traffic to those articles with the most impact for your business.

• Contact Form
  

This plugin allows you to install an easy to use contact form on your site.

• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
  

This plugin allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.  Overall a big time saver and greatly reduces vulnerabilities.

 

We will now review how to optimize your site for search engines in Step 7 of the handbook.

Step 7: Optimize SEO

 

In general WordPress is considered to be a well optimized system out of the box for SEO purposes.  We are going to cover a few things you can improve on, and review a general linking/site strategies that will improve your businesses exposure in Google and other search engines.

 

Specifically we will cover:

 

 

• General URL Structure.
• Titles and descriptions.
• Image optimization
  
• Links

URL's

 

Permalinks

The first thing to change in your Wordpress backend is the permalink structure. this is so the most descriptive and keyword friendly part of your URL (the post title) can be shown and indexed. You can change these settings under Settings -> Permalinks.

 

The default permalink is?p=<postid>, but it is generally considered best practice to select the Custom URL option and change your settings to include the category, and your postname or just the postname in your URL structure.

 

To do this copy and paste /%category%/%postname%/ into the custom URL box.

 

 

www vs non-www
Deciding whether to have the www in your URL structure was once a bigger topic,  The search engines have gotten smarter and group both the www and non-www domains together as one site.  Saying that, it is still a good practice to pick one or the other.

 

This currently is set in Wordpress based on the domain you've entered as your "Blog URL" in Settings → General.

 

 

Titles

 

Good titles evoke an emotional response for your readers, Google shows the first 60 to 70 characters in the search results, so make sure your important keywords happen early in the page title for the users benefit. I would recommended installing the All in One SEO pack plugin, this will allow you to control your page titles for all of your posts.

 

If you are looking for some inspirational copy writing for your titles, I would recommend:

 

Usability Expert Jacob Nielsen: Reviewing the BBC's headlines which he calls the Worlds Best.

 

A few of his heading suggestions include being:

 

• short (because people don't read much online);
• rich in information scent, clearly summarizing the target article;
• front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items);
• understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results);
• predictable

 

Here are a few additional headline resources to inspire you:

 

The Blog Herald: Utilizing Ad headlines as inspiration for your titles

Sitepoint: 8 Examples of profitable headlines

Copybloggers: Why some people always write great headlines
Copybloggers: 10 Sure-Fire headlines that work

 

Images

 

One way to drive a little extra traffic to your site and help those viewing your site your site in a screen-reader is writing good alt tags for your images and making sure you give them an accurate and descriptive name.

If you don't have the time to adjust these manually for your Wordpress business blog, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image's alt and title tag

 

 

Links

External Links
This is a very large topic in its own right, and gaining links to your small business Wordpress site is critical to your success in getting your company ranked highly in the search engines.  I will go over the basics and then link to more detailed articles from which you can explore further:

Articles:

-SEO Book: Value of #1 Ranking

Analyzes the breakdown of search engine rankings in terms of value to businesses.

-SEO Books, Bloggers guide to SEO

Great overview by Aaron Wall covering the basics to get your site some quality exposure.

-SEOMoz, Beginders guide to SEO

Covers a wide range of topics including growing a sites popularity and overall SEO strategies.
-Smashing Magazine: Google page rank and what do we know about it.

Reviews one of Google's ranking structure.

-66 Ways to build links

Aggregate of link building ideas that could be used to gain valuable links for your companies website.

-SEO Book: Finding link sources

Reviews how to find links that our authoritative and valuable for your business.

 

Resources:

-Google's Webmaster guidelines:

An overview of Google's best practices for creating and managing your site.
-Google's SEO Starter Guide:

PDF document of Google's best practices that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing.

-SEOmoz Internet Marketing Handbook

Excellent aggregate of tools and resources from around the web

-Sphinn

Social network for Search Engine Optimization experts.

 

Tools:

-Google Insights:

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

-Adwords Traffic Estimator
Get quick traffic estimates for new keywords and a general idea of your competition and general PPC costs.

-Alexa Ranking

Track how your small business Wordpress site is doing over time.

-Backlink Analyzer
Research and analyze websites for link quality. Checks for Indexed Pages, Links to Website, EDU & .GOV Links, Domain Age & Expiration, Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, DMOZ Listing

-Keyword Difficulty Tool
This tool is used to analyze the competition for of a particular search term or phrase, also provides a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at Google and Yahoo.

 

Internal Links
Internal links can be powerful in helping you distribute the link equity that your external links bring, they can also decrease your bounce rate and increase your page views per visitor by sending your visitors to other pages

 

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier is by installing a few plugins that will automatically bring your old and popular content to the surface automatically.  These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

 

-Popularity Contest

This plugin will determine which of your content is the most popular. This can then be displayed on your site to drive traffic to those articles with the most impact for your business.

-Related Posts

This WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress tags and include them at the bottom of your content.

 

 

Now that we have covered optimizing your site for search engine and traffic exposure in Step 8 we will cover: Theme customizations, e-commerce integration and many other ways to improve your companies site design and performance.

 

Step 8: Customize

 

To make customizing your site a little easier, I would highly recommend you download the following tools to help speed up the process and troubleshoot items along the way:

 

Tools to manage your companies site:

 

-Firefox:

Advanced web browser that offers many plugins to help in Wordpress management and customizations.

 

 

-Web Developer Toolbar:

A powerful plugin for Firefox that allows you to easily check code, check file paths and update your small business Wordpress site easily.

 

 

-Filezilla

An open source FTP program that allows you to easily connect to your server and change/modify your Wordpress files.

 

 

 

Shop

 

Are you interested in including an e-commerce element into your site?  There are a few possible solutions for you, we will cover simple plugin and copy and paste solutions as well as briefly touching on larger scale solutions and payment options.

 

Copy and Paste e-commerce solutions:

 

-WP E-Commerce

This free plugin is a fully integrated shopping cart application suitable for selling your small business digital and tangible products, services, and or fees online.  Integration with Wordpress 2.8.2, Paypal and Google Checkout payments, etc.

 

-E-Junkie

A simple to use e-commerce application that lets you copy and paste a complete shopping cart solution into your site.  E-junkie offers reasonable pricing structure and in my opinion is one of the most user friendly options available.

 

Advanced e-commerce solutions:

 

Here are a few other free Open Source carts that you might consider if you need your e-commerce system to handle a larger number of products.

 

-Magento

Our recommendation and winner of man Open Source awards.

-Prestashop

-Zencart

Payment Options:

You will need some form of credit card payment processor integrated into your e-commerce solution no matter which application you choose.

 

Our favorite solution is to use Paypal, some of its benefits include:

 

-Services: Manage subscription services or reoccuring payments, donations, multiple currencies.

-Fees: No start-up or monthly fees, no cancellation fees, and no minimum payments.

-Integration: Almost all e-commerce solutions will allow you to integrate Paypal payments.
-Security: PayPal has 60%-70% lower fraud loss rates than other merchant accounts
-Large user base: One in three online buyers in the U.S. has a PayPal account.

 

Steps to sign up your business for Paypal:

 

1) Click here to go to Paypal signup page

2)Choose your country or region & language option
3) Choose the business account option.

4) Verify your email address and bank account information.

5) Your done! You should now be able to accept payments to the email address and account you just setup.

 

 

Email

 

We will now review email issues in relation to your companies site.  Including how to add and manage custom email addresses, and how to implement a successful email marketing system into your site.

 

Creating a custom address:

 

Hostmonster and other hosting providers usually offer numerous email options.

1. Regular POP/IMAP accounts.
2. Forwarders
3. Basic Auto Responders
4. Premium & Basic Mailing lists
5. Anti Spam Tools ( Postini, Spam Assassin, & Mail Filtering)

To create an email address log in to the cPanel and find the Email Accounts Icon. Click it and create the desired email address.

When asked "Do you want to configure this account to work with a Client?", click yes.

Please note the manual settings, for most clients the incoming and outgoing servers will be set up as "mail.yourdomain.com".  This is also the information you will need if trying to import your mail into Outlook or Gmail.

If using Mac Mail use the SSL options.

Test the account settings now and you should be up and running.

 

Email Marketing:

 

Market to your customers over time by integrating an email marketing system and signup into your Wordpress site can be an excellent communication tool for your business.

 

It is easy to integrate a signup form onto your website to capture visitors information and easily add them to your mailing list.

 

 

The first steps in implementing an email marketing system is to get an email service provider.  At the most basic level these companies insure that your emails are delivered properly and make their way through the spam filters into peoples inbox.

 

A few of the email marketing providers I recommend include: Icontact, Aweber, and Swiftpage.

 

You might be wondering why you need to sign up for another service for your business?  These companies do more than just deliver email these days.  All three of the services mentioned above can:

 

• Automatically add contacts your your mailing list
• Manage opt-outs
• Track who opened which emails and if they clicked on any of the links.
• Send out emails automatically to your list at a time and date that you specify

Note: We have another handbook available for HTML email marketing for small businesses.

 

 

Social Media

 

Social Networking:

 

Staying in an ongoing conversation with your companies customers is very important in today's shifting market.  Wordpress offers some easy ways to integrate your existing social networking work into your site.

 

A few option to consider:

 

 

 

-Twitter Posts

Increase your companies other social media exposure by including your latest Twitter posts on your blog.

 

 

 

 

-Linkedin Badge

Easily include a badge that links directly to your Linkedin profile

 

 

 

 

-Facebook Integration

There are several ways to get bidirectional integration between Wordpress and Facebook.  Here are a few resources to get you started:

 

-Integrate a Facebook fan page widget into your Wordpress site.

-Smashing Magazine: Wordpress and Facebook integration options article.

 

 

Social Bookmarking:

 

Getting exposure for your site is becoming more and more important.  Utilizing social bookmarking tools can gain you valuable links and referrals to your site.

-Share This

This plugin will allow your visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend.  Includes analytics to track what content of yours is being shared and complete customization of which social networks to show.

 

Commenting System:

 

Commenting systems are starting to include multiple ways to login and begin sharing on your site.  It is now easy to integrate with Facebook Connect, OpenId and other networking sites.  This increases the conversation on your site and reduces spam at the same time.

 

We recommended either:

 

1) Disqus

-Wordpress plugin found here.

 

 

 

 

2) IntenseDebate (Owned by the same company as Wordpress).

-Wordpress plugin found here.

 

 

 

 

Both of these services can easily be setup on your Wordpress site and their features are so similiar to one another that it becomes a personalized decision on which to integrate with.

 

Security

 

One downside of the popularity of Wordpress is it makes it vulnerable to security threats.  There are a few things that you can change to help your site avoid being compromised.

 

1) Install these two plugins if you haven't already from our recommended list:

 

• Wordpress Database Backup

This plugin can be set to automatically email you a backup of your Wordpress database on a daily or weekly basis.  Its one less thing to remember and a general time and sanity saver in case something goes wrong on your site.

• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
  

This plugin allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.  Overall a big time saver and greatly reduces vulnerabilities.

• Login Lockdown
  

After being installed, this plugin will record all log-in attempts. locking out visitors for a specified time after a certain number of failed attempts. Thus, robots and hackers are limited in the scale of their attack.

 

 

2) Remove the default "admin" username

When you install WordPress, it automatically generates a user with Administrator-level permissions called admin.  Since this is generic the hackers can target it will brute force password hacks.

To delete the admin user, first create a new user with the Administrator role through your WordPress Admin Panel (name it something that can’t be easily guessed). Then, with the newly-created user, delete the admin user. This technique saves you from doing this via MySQL query (or a MySQL GUI like phpMyAdmin).

 

3) Pick a strong password.

Utilizing a strong password is probably one of the easiest preventative steps you can take in improving the security of your Wordpress installation.

If you would like to have someone generate a secure password for you, This site has a tool you can use.

 

Overall these are a few simple steps that can help you to avoid issues.  If you want to get into a few more advanced security configurations I would recommended these resources.

 

-Smashing Magazine: 10 Steps to protect yout admin
-Noupe: Security tips and hacks

-Wordpress.org: Hardening Wordpress

-Problogdesign: 11 ways to improve Wordpress security

 

Theme

1) Changing your themes logo:

Necessary tools:

-FTP Client (Filezilla is recommended)

 

Optional tools:

-Web Developer toolbar for Firefox

 

At is most basic level all you are doing creating your new logo and then using the FTP client overwrite the old logo located in your Wordpress theme (Usually found in wp-content >> themes >> Your theme name >> images ) It is generally named ‘logo.png’.

 

If you are having trouble located the image file location, use the Web developer toolbar and go to Images >> View Image Information.  This will show you the image and folder location of every image on your current page.  You can also get the pixel dimension of your logo if you need it for your new design creation using this tool.

 

You can replace the logo with your own by simply replacing the original ‘logo.png’ with your own same name logo image by browsing and using your FT client.

 

2) Changing your themes background color or image:

For changing themes general background you don't need to change any code, just in case this is the part

body {
margin: 0;
background: url("images/bg.gif");
}

Basically, what you have to do now is go to your theme's directory and find this image
wp-content/themes/images/bg.gif open it with your image editing software you have, change it's color and save it; overwriting the original image.

As for the post background color and text color you have to directly edit theme's style.css file.

 

This can be done in the Wordpress Admin: Appearance >> Editor >> Style.css.

You will have to determine what CSS class your background is using.  This can be done by using the Web Developer Toolbar: Then selecting the CSS tool >> View Style Information.  This will then give you the information you are looking for and is usually named body or background in the style sheet.

#background {
color: #FFFFFF; change to new color: ex: #000000;
float: left;
margin-bottom: 16px;
width: 554px;
padding: 7px;
background: #03181B; change to new color ex:#FFFFFF;
}

 

5) Make your homepage static.

 

Since you are more than likely wanting to have your companies homepage be formatted to something other than a blog format, the steps below show you how to make a static page your homepage:

1. In your WP control panel, select the Pages tab.
2. Click on Add New.
3. Give the page a title, “New Home Page”or something similar.
4. Create the content for your home page just as you would a blog post.
5. Click the Publish button.

While you’re still in the Write Page subpanel, create a second page:

1. Title this one “Recent Posts”or something similar.
2. You don’t need to have any Page Content for this one.
3. Click the Publish button.

Now you’re ready tell Wordpress  to use your new page as the home page:

1. In the Settings panel on the left navigation select Reading.
2. At the top of the Reading Options subpanel you’ll see:

Default Reading Settings In Wordpress
3. To change the front page to your new home page, select “A static page” for Front page displays.
4. Select “New Home Page” from the Front page drop down menu.
5. Finally, be sure to tell Wordpress which page to use to display your recent posts. From the Posts page menu select the “Recent Posts” page you created earlier.

Set Your Page As The Home Page For Wordpress
6. Click Save Changes.

View your site. “New Home Page” should now be your home page.

 

4) Editing images in your theme:

 

There are now a large selection of web based image editors available for free, perfect for your small business that does not need to have a full license to Photoshop or other image editing program.

 

These editors can adjust sizes, coloring, crop, import from Flickr/Picasa and many other features.  A few recommended solutions include:

 

-Picnik

-Fotoflexer

-Snipshot

-Splashup

5) Schedule your Wordpress posts to be published at a certain day and time:

This function allows you to stay ahead of yourself by finishing up articles in advance and have them ready to go.

 

1) Create a Post as usual in Dashboard >> Posts >. Add New

2) Once you are done writing the post, before hitting publish you need to look at the option right above the publish button which reads “Publish immediately”.

3) Click on Edit.

4) Set your desired published start date.

5) Click schedule.

 

Easy as that, your posts should be published for your business site automatically.