• Users

  After WordPress is installed, I immediately change the Admin password. While I’m in the Admin user, I change or add anything else (names, email, etc). Also it’s a good idea to set up any other users the client and I have talked about.

• Settings

  General Settings: Edit the Blog Title if needed and change the Tagline to suit (”Just another WordPress blog” isn’t going to suit many clients). Adjust the Membership if I’m not creating a public blog and also alter the Date and Time Format to suit the client, or I might need to change those later if I didn’t get that information yet. I change the day of the week to start on Sunday.

  Permalinks: Change the Permalinks Settings to display prettier and more SE-friendly urls. I usually choose the Month and Date style permalinks.

  Writings, Reading and Miscellaneous: Later on, I’m going to come back to Writing to change the Default Link and Post categories, Reading to change which page is displayed as the home page (if I’m not creating a personal blog), and Miscellaneous to adjust the image sizes (after I’ve created the design).

• Pages

  Next, I create all the pages in my website. I do this even before I start a design because I spend a lot of time studying the content this way. It’s a good idea to require complete content before you begin working on a client’s site (or at least, as complete as possible). It allows you to understand just what the design needs to do. While I create the pages, I also set the Menu Order and Page Parents so the site navigation architecture and sitemap are created from the outset. At this stage I adjust any permalinks that aren’t very pretty, and I go back to Settings > Reading and change which page is displayed as Home and which is the blog.

• Post Categories

  If I’m creating a site with a blog, the next thing I do is set up the Post Categories. The default is Uncategorized, which isn’t very informative. If I don’t need this category, I change the name to something that better fits the site, and if I know any other categories the client will need, I set those up too. If needed, I go back to Settings > Writing and change the Default Post Category.

• Link Categories

  I also set up any Link Categories I know the client will use, and if needed I go back to Settings > Writing and change the Default Link Category. But with a little planning, you might not need to change these defaults.

• The Design

  By now, I’m itching to start designing, so I usually jump into this. I either do the design in Photoshop or right in the web browser. (I talked more about this in an earlier post). In this article, this step appears infinitely shorter than it truly is.

• The Theme

  So now I’m ready to slice the design up and create the WP theme. I love designing, but this is almost my favorite part: getting to see it onscreen. The files typically included with a theme are part of the “default” theme, so as a shortcut I might duplicate this directory, rename it and then modify the files to suit my tastes.

  I like to start customizing my themes with header.php. Pretty much every header.php file I’ve ever done looks quite the same no matter what kind of site I’m doing: php and WP functions to create the page title and maybe a unique description for every page, all important meta tags, stylesheet link names (for screen and print), rss links, and how I display the logo and the main menu are all created in almost the exact same manner from site to site.

  Likewise with elements in footer.php. The structure is the same though the content may change. I try to use WP or PHP functions to generate the blog name and copyright date so they update automatically if and when something changes.

  Throughout the theme’s files, I try to create headers, links, blocks of text, and background graphics much the same way from site to site. I name layout elements and images the same so they are easy to match up. So the background for the div tag with an id=”content” is named “bg_content.___”. I write the stylesheet the same way too, usually starting out with Eric Meyer’s default browser CSS styles. I do all this so I don’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to create the xhtml or css, and I can spend more time making a site look great onscreen. Plus, I have several established techniques to make a site accessible and SE-friendly. Matt Brett used to have a bullet point on his site that bringing an established XHTML+CSS skeleton to every project saves time and money, which clients always appreciate. I agree; no reason to reinvent the wheel every time.

• Time for some Plugins

  I have a few plugins I like and tend to use from site to site. For example, cforms is a reliable and robust contact form plugin. I’m not as excited about WP-Table, but it’s okay for creating html tables if I think the client will need to create his own tables frequently. Twitter Tools is another fave. I keep a toolbox of plugins that I might want to for a site, but before I install I always check if there’s a more current version. Outdated plugins can create a leak in your site, inviting hackers and other bad people.

• Analytics and Backup

  For Analytics and Backup, other people smarter than I recommend installing these plugins, and I have no complaint: Akismet (checks your comments for spam), Google XML Sitemaps (creates Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog), and WP-DB-Backup (allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables). I haven’t tried this one out yet, All in One SEO Pack, but almost 1.5 million downloads can’t be wrong. Set up Google Analytics to monitor your web traffic and create a Wordpress robots.txt file and add it to your root directory.

• Wrapping Up

  Then I pay attention to the little stuff: create and upload a favicon, set up Feedburner to monitor the RSS feed if needed or at least make sure the RSS is working, check that the 404 page is set up and useful, validate the xhtml and the css, and test the site on several different browsers (though it’s helpful to do this testing while creating the stylesheet and not save this to the end).

Resources and Link Love

You might think you saw some of this elsewhere, and you’re probably right. I’m certainly not smart enough to come up with all this on my own. Here’s a list of great resources you can check out to help you remember everything you need to do before sending your site out into the great big world:

• 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress
• 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website
• The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
• Digital Web Magazine: SEO and Your Web Site
• Check browser statistics to see which sites you should be supporting
• WordPress SEO
• What Aspect Of SEO Should You Be Spending Most Of Your Time On?
• Eric Meyer’s default browser CSS styles

Bring your dog, your child’s dog, your neighbors dog, or no dog at all for a walk around Terry Hershey Park to raise money for pancreatic cancer research.