Blogging For Photographers – Getting Started With WordPress

In yesterday’s post, we looked at the basics of blogging for the photographer; the reasons why a blog is a great idea, and why you should consider having a blog to showcase your work and communicate with your clients.

I also mentioned that WordPress is, without any doubt, my first and foremost recommendation for running a blog.

This web site, for example, is running a WordPress blog, and using a custom theme that I coded myself (which is not too hard if you know a lot about HTML, CSS etc.).

Today, I’m going to look at some of the steps involved in creating a WordPress blog site from scratch and getting your first post out there – as you’ll see, it’s a lot easier than you might think, and you can have the blog up and running in just a few minutes!

What You Will Need

Before you get started with creating your blog, there are a few things you’ll need:

• Your own domain (http://www.yourdomain.com/ for example)
• An FTP client and access to your domain
• About 10 minutes (for the basic setup)

Your own domain is obviously necessary for you to host the blog. I recommend that you put the blog in a subfolder such as:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/

Pretty obvious really, huh?

You’ll need an FTP client in order to copy the WordPress software to your domain. I recommend FileZilla, which you can download free from here:

http://filezilla-project.org/

#1: Download And Install The WordPress Software

You can download the latest version of WordPress as well as some handy installation instructions etc. from the WordPress web site at:

http://wordpress.org/

Save the downloaded file to a folder on your hard drive and then unzip the contents.

Rather than me repeat everything that the good folks from WordPress have already written, I suggest you read their great instructions at:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

However, before you complete the installation instructions, please read the following section!

Important Security Feature

One amendment I would make at this stage, for the sake of the security of your blog, is to change the database table names for your WordPress installation. It’s much easier to do this NOW, before you initialize the blog, rather than to wait until later. It’s not by any means essential, but it will put another roadblock up for potential hackers.

Here’s how to do that.

Open the file ‘wp-config.php’ in the WordPress folder. Look for a section entitled “WordPress Database Table Prefix”. In there is a line of code that looks like this:

$table_prefix = ‘wp_’;

Go ahead and change that to something like:

$table_prefix = ‘yourchosenprefix_’;

This means that your database table names will not be set to the default, which most hackers will rely on finding. It’s a bit like setting the combination to a safe to something other than the factory default!

Once you’ve finished editing your ‘wp-config.php’ file, as directed by the installation instructions, you’ll need to copy the WordPress files to your server using your FTP client (eg: FileZilla)

You can then finish the setup by following the rest of the installation instructions.

#2: Setting Up Your Blog

Before you can start writing your blog posts, there are some more things that you’ll need to do.

Firstly, I suggest you take some time to familiarize yourself with the WordPress dashboard, and take a tour of the different menu options and settings that are available to you.

The most important and commonly used sections are:

• Posts
• Pages
• Comments
• Appearance
• Plugins
• Settings

You’ll find that you spend the majority of your time in the WordPress admin area in one of these sections, so it’s worth spending a bit of time to get used to what they are and how to use them.

The first thing you’re going to need to set up is the “General Settings“. This is where the blog title, your tagline, email address etc. are all stored. I suggest using keywords in your tagline, and make sure that you have the correct time zone set too, as this will affect the posting times of your blog posts and comments.

The next section to change is “Permalinks” and this is one of the most important, at least from an SEO perspective. You’ll find this under the settings menu.

A “permalink” is basically a human-readable permanent link for each of your posts, pages etc. Unless you have a strong preference otherwise, I would select the “month and name” option. This will create a pleasing and uniform structure to your blog that makes sense to the reader.

Finally, if you want to be sure that your site will show up in the search engines, make certain that the “I would like my site to be visible…” option is checked in the “Privacy” settings.

There are lots of other options, but these are the most important ones to check at this stage.

#3: Selecting Plugins

Plugins are independent pieces of software designed to work seamlessly with the WordPress software, to provide enhanced functionality and to accomplish tasks not catered for by WordPress.

There are literally thousands of plugins available, for all kinds of purposes, but there are some that you should absolutely have as a minimum:

• Akismet (Spam protection for comments)
• All In One SEO
• XML Sitemap Generator
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

You can learn what each of these does, and how to configure them on their respective web sites.

#4: Choose A Theme

WordPress is coded in such a way that the content of the blog, and the software to run it, are each independent of the look of the site. The appearance of your blog is determined by a theme, which is constructed from a combination of PHP scripts, HTML, CSS and even JavaScript.

WordPress comes with a couple of basic themes, none of which are particularly great in my opinion. But then, why would the WordPress folks bother to produce themes as well, when there’s a huge market in custom themes, some available for a price, and others free of charge?

It’s not really possible for me to tell you which theme you should be using for your site, but the beauty of themes is that you can change them easily if you decide you don’t like the way the site looks, or if it doesn’t suit your purpose.

However, a word of business caution here:

It’s a good idea to choose a theme that fits in with your overall branding and business colors. Then try to stick with it. Don’t forget that most of the people viewing your blog won’t have seen it before, and therefore won’t be bored by it in the same way you might be, for instance. Concentrate on the main purpose of your blog, which is to post content and communicate with your clients!

I do see quite a few photographers and other blogger “theme-hopping“, but this is not the best business practice for you and your blog in the long run.

#5: Sidebar Or No Sidebar?

Themes generally have one or more sidebars (that vertical bar of content that you can see over there on the right, if you’re reading this on the blog and not in the RSS feed), or may not have a sidebar at all.

The sidebar is useful for such things that exist outside of your posts, such as recent comments, random posts, external links (don’t have too many of those, you’ll lose SEO benefits), a list of tags, categories etc.

These are designed to allow ease of use of the site, and also to encourage engagement with the user by providing other internal links for them to explore.

My advice is to choose a theme with a sidebar that fits your needs, but I think that themes with 2 or even 3 sidebars are overdoing it a little – in those cases, the blogs end up looking more like a newsletter than a blog, which is fine if that’s what you want.

#6: Time To Post Some Content!

I’m sure you’re dying to write your first post, but before you do you need to create yourself some categories. These could be “wedding photography“, “pet portraits” or whatever you like. They just sound a lot better than the standard “uncategorized“!

Having done that, it’s time to post some content to the blog, and I’ve found some good ways of doing so that suit my needs, and which you might also find useful.

Firstly, I long ago gave up writing blog posts by using the built-in editor. It’s not that it doesn’t work very well, it’s just that I find it much easier to edit my posts in a Word document and then cut and paste.

Even with that seemingly simple method, there are some things to watch out for.

Writing Text

The textual part of my blog posts is written in Word, as already mentioned, so that I can make use of a decent spell checker, and not be bothered by any of the other clutter of the WordPress dashboard.

In Word, I do make sure that I edit the “normal” style for paragraphs to give me 6pts above and below each paragraph. That way, I can type without having to add a blank line between paragraphs, yet still see them as separate. If I do add extra lines to separate paragraphs then this can create too much spacing in the blog post when it’s posted.

The Post Editor

In the WordPress post editor there is a special button to enable you to cut and paste in text from Word, shown by a red arrow in the diagram above. If you can’t see it, make sure you click the “Show/hide the kitchen sink” button.

After pasting in your post text, it’s fairly straightforward to edit it and format it the way you want it to look.

Dealing With Images

Images in posts can be tricky at the best of times, and I’ve found the easiest way to handle them is to store them in a special folder on your web server and then reference them by URL in the post. When you click the “add image” button (first one to the right of where it says “upload/insert”), you’ll see a tab that allows you to specify a URL for the image you want to insert. You just need to remember to upload it to the folder on your web server first!

#7: Scheduling Your Posts

One of the most important things about blogging, from a business standpoint, is to be as consistent as you possibly can.

That means you should, as far as possible, try to stick to a regular posting schedule. It doesn’t matter if you want to post once a day or once a week, your readers will get used to your rhythm and may get upset if you deviate too far from it.

Take it from one who knows from experience, though, this can be tough!

The answer is to work with a posting schedule that works for you. If you want to write a post each day, then I suggest you write them in batches and then schedule them in advance. You can do that by clicking “edit” next to the “publish immediately” button and then entering a specific time.

This way, you could write all your posts for a week on one day, schedule them, and then let the blog take care of itself while you prepare new material.

Final Thoughts

I hope that you’ve found this post useful, and that you’re ready to get started on your own blog!

If you have any questions or comments, then please let me know, and I (or someone else who knows better) will try to help you!

Thanks for reading and I’ll talk to you again soon!

In the meantime, I wish you continued peace in your business.

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