Setting up a WordPress website can seem a bit challenging in the beginning but after learning the system it’s quite easy.

There are a few essentials when setting up your first website. After setting up several of my own and to help out my brother and newphew and everyone else just getting started, I figured I would create this simple step guide.

Initial Set-up of WordPress. I won’t get to much into installing the basic wordpress platform as it’s been quite well covered and with most web hosting providers, they offer a one click set-up. This is to assist you with what needs to be done after its been installed.

If your web host doesn’t currently offer one click installation, you can download WordPress here
Use these instruction to to install your wordpress Website – WordPress Website Simply Instructions

After Installation you should be able to upgrade to the most current version automatically. If not use these instructions to do so. With so many advances in wordpress technology I recommend using the most current version possible.

Now that you have WordPress installed on your server you’ll have both an admin area, ususally “YourWebsite.com/wp-admin/ you’ll have setup a user name and password to access your admin area. The admin area is where you’ll produce all your content, install themes, widgets, plugins and manage every aspect of your wordpress website.

There are several important steps when setting up your wordpress website once its been installed.

You’ll need or want to choose a theme that works best for your content type. There are several ways to select the theme or layouts for your new website, but it’s important when choosing your theme, what type of navigation you’ll need. You can choose categories or pages as a main navigation system. This is an important consideration, actually it’s an extremely important consideration. The difference between setting up using pages vs categories is quite simply but is difficult for people to understand in some cases when getting started.

The basic difference between the two are, pages stay the same, and categories are dynamic main topics they allow you to organize posts under them. An example of this would be if you have a website that covers several topics, for example “Money”. You may have a category that talks about Saving Money and another about  Making Money. Each of these would be categories, one day you may want to write about a new way you learned to save money, you would write your save money post then select the category save money where it will be displayed. When a user clicks the link Save Money each article you’ve written about saving money would appear with the most recent appearing at the top.

Pages on the other hand are always the same, generally they are reserved for items that stay the same from day to day. Your “About Me” page will generally stay the same as will the Contact Us page. If you website is a business website you may have a “How to Apply” Page and it will usually stay the same. So categories are general topics to arrange posts and pages are static and generally stay the same.

Most WordPress themes are arranged offering both pages and cateories, the difference is which is simply which one you should use as the main navigation. My website Pennyroll.com works best with Category navigation as the main system because it covers many topics.

Basically if your covering several topics use categories, if your covering one topic, use pages.

Within your wordpress admin click on “Add New Themes” and you can install themes directly, as opposed to downloading them and then re uploading them via an ftp client. If you’re going to use an ftp client I recommend FileZilla it’s free, opensource, and fully featured.

Now that we have wordpress setup and a theme installed, there are many things that need to be done. Lets start at the top and work our way down. By the way this may all seem like a lot of work but it goes quite quickly and if you’re committing to writing everyday and serious about this new website, you must know that it’s going to take some time. It’s basically going to become your new hobby, so either enjoy it or it’s just not worth it.

Next well talk about the ever important plugins. Plugins are essentially small add-ons for your website. They both increase the functionally of your site and can make it easier for a visitor to use. They can also take away from your website, make it slow and decrease efficiently. Each time you add a plugin or widget you’re adding more code that the user has to process. If your adding plugins and widgets use cautions.

There are simply millions of plugins and widgets available for you to choose from. Some are quite important and others are worthless. There are however several plugins that are essential. An example of an essential plugin would be akismet. This plug-in is essential if you plan to allow comments on your blog. There are plenty of spammers out there and this little plugin will run the comments that appear on your blog against a database of comments that have been flagged as spam then automatically block them for your approval or disapproval.

Rather than write an entire section of add ons, I’ll refer you to an article about plugins I wrote on the subject.
If you’d rather have the quick rundown, here’s the list of the most important plugins to add to your WordPress website.
Akismet - Keep your comments clean
SEOPlugin Easily Optimize your pages
Both My Page Order & My Category Order –  Move around your pages and categories in any order you perfer
AddToAny or SexyBookmarks – Social Networking, and sharing
Google Sitemap – easily add a sitemap to google
Contact Form 7 - Easy fully featured forms
WordPress Backup – Backup your wordpress files

Add each of these plug-ins to any new wordpress website you create.

Permalink Structure
A WordPress website by defult automatically sets up a url for each post you create. You have a few options as to how you would like them to appear. This step is quite important because it’s important to do this in the very beginning, before you ever create a post. Your goal here is to setup a url that is both friendly to search engines as well as users. The default p=123 is not either, day and name as well as month name make your content seem relative to to date ad if your content isn’t time sensitive then you should probably not use this method either, numeric isn’t a good option either. That only leaves custom as a choice. You’ll notice that this post is date time, this is because when I first setup Pennyroll.com I skipped this all important step and have now been indexed with date permalink structure. I could go back and redirect everything to a custom url I just haven’t had time to do so yet.

Default http://www.pennyroll.com/?p=123

Day and name http://www.pennyroll.com/2009/12/16/sample-post/

Month and name http://www.pennyroll.com/2009/12/sample-post/

Numeric http://www.pennyroll.com/archives/123

Custom http://www.pennyroll.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

I recommend using custom with either /%category%/%postname%/ ORsimply /%postname%/ either one of these options will be easy for users and search engines to read and ensure that you content is not date stamped like mine is.

You’ll find the permalink setup under settings – permalinks

Just as important if not much more important is the initial setup of your webpage address url. Under the General Settings  ”Settings – General”  you’ll have the option to enter the url of your website. This may seem like a simple step and it is, but you can make a simple yet critical mistake here. I did. The simple tip is, don’t leave out the WWW portion of the url. When I surf the web I usually put in the url as example.com I don’t usually add www when going to a website, so with out thinking I filled in this section as pennyroll.com. So my url was Pennyroll.com which caused an automatic redirect to www.pennyroll.com. My entire website was indexed incorrectly because of this little mistake.

Many people believe that the days of making money with domain names are long gone, they believe that because loans.com, and cars.com are gone that the money’s already been made. Gone are the day’s that you could register a domain and sell it for a quick million, but selling domains in the neighborhood of 15.00 to 7,000.00 and sometimes even more, is still quite viable and certainly not a bad income.

There are plenty of active market to sell domains and plenty of tools to find great domain names as well. If this idea peaks your curiosity, here’s how and where to get started. For selling as well as learning more about this business, stop by DNForums.com a mature community with plenty of info regarding the domain business, and a great place to sell domain name. You’ll also want to stop by the Domain forum at DigitalPoint.com. For finding newly expired and/or quality keyword domains, spend some time at the sites listed below. These are some of the best, but you’ll find even more once you get your feet wet. A few more resources to get familiar with if you’re interested in making some fast cash with domains include, Sedo.com and Moniker.com

As you know, finding domain name these days can be quite challenging to say the least. It seems that almost everything is taken and if you use a service like Godaddy.com to generate ideas you’ll likely get silly suggestions. A search for “small business” will generate suggestions like “ImageSmallBusinesses.com” probably not exactly what you were looking for. Thankfully a small number of websites have dedicated themselves to helping you find the domains your seeking.

1. DomainsBot.com

Domainsbot is a valuable and intelligent service that generates quality domains closely related to the topic your searching. It will take the keyword your looking for and replace them with closely related word from the thesaurus.

2. Domaintools.com

Domain tools has become the goto service on the web when it comes to finding domain name that are currently available. Aside from generating great domains they offer an array of other tools as well. Tools such as domain history, typo generator, domain monitoring and more.

3. JustDropped.com

Just dropped has to be one of the best tools on the web when it comes to finding quality domain names. Just dropped focuses on domain name that have recently expired and have deleted. Everyday thousands of quality domains expire and become available again. To see the most current list of these domain use JustDropped.com

4. 7thSpace.com

7thSpace is a another useful tool when looking for that perfect domain name. They offer currently expiring domain lists.

5. SaveSpell.com
Another powerful tool when it comes to locating that perfect domain is Savespell.com Easy to read and offers an extremely updated list of domains as they become available. With an easy to read Red or Green symbol next to each domain it allows for quick and easy scanning of the lists.

6. BustaName.com

Bust a name offers an extremely unique way of searching for a domain name. By adding different keywords to your list the tool will generate domains that are available. Each keyword will be combined with another to see if something comes up. As you enter keywords, you can create groups so that certain word can’t be combined.

7. InstantDomainSearch.com

I had to go back and find this one. Instant domain search isn’t one I use often but I enjoy it when I do use it. The way Instant Domain Search work is, it check whether a domain is available each time you enter a letter. It’s a nce feature but it tricks me too often and makes me feel that something is available when it’s not. However it can be a very useful tool and worth being on the list of great domain tools.

Negotiating
Negotiation is an important and often overlooked skill. Negotiation is not something that you do only at car lots but an art that can be used any time money changes hands.

Many don’t realize or consider the fact most businesses and people alike are willing to negotiate the price on just about any product or service their offering.

I’ve negotiated a better price for a products in places you wouldn’t ever expect like Wal-mart for example. I decided a while back that if I didn’t like the price of a product or service or if I felt that I could get a better deal then the initial offer I would at least give it try. I almost always counter offer.

It’s surprising to know that you can work out a better deal anywhere from chain stores to a hot dog stand at a local event.

It’s important to realize people want and need to make sales, and you have the right to save the money you work hard for. I was recently at a pawn shop that was going out of business and wanted to close out all their merchandise. I noticed that a lot of the products still had the original price tag on them and that the owners were making up the prices as they went along.

You would basically bring a product to the counter he would give you the new lower price and you would either take it or leave it. Most were so happy they were getting a new lower price so they would just take the new deal. On the other hand I would make a counter offer and leave it to him to take it or leave it. The offer I would make, the counter offer would be low which would allow him room to make me a new even better offer.

For example, that day I bought a camera. It was an 80.00 dollar camera that had a 40.00 dollar price tag, I brought it to him, he offered 20.00 (the new low price everyone else was accepting) I countered with 10.00 which he declined. After all I was just shopping. He came back to me and said he would give me the camara for 15.00 I could have taken the deal but instead I said 12.00 I got it for 12.00 bucks. That’s the same as getting a .20 cent raise at work for an entire week!

If you think it’s not a respected way of doing business. I got an inadvertent compliment that day. You see my wife was there with me and was standing at the counter when the owner of the pawn shop leaned over and told her “that’s a really smart guy right there” apparently he liked my style. I’m not telling you that to toot my own horn, but to relay to you that it’s a respected way of doing business in nearly every situation.

Sure that seems like a place that a person might negotiate but it was amazing how many people weren’t doing it.

A few months ago I was at a local event and went up to the hot dog stand for 4 hot dogs, the vendor said it would be 8.00 dollars (you know how hot dog stand are, expensive) Well you know that he’s making quite a profit on 4 hot dogs at 8 bucks. I said I’ll give you 5 he said no deal. Now you could say “well that didn’t work” or you could say “well, it’s only 4 hot dogs I’ll tell ya what, I’ll give ya 6 bucks” He took the deal because it would be dumb not to, after all 6 dollars for 4 hot dogs is a great profit. Now I guarantee that no one else negotiated those dogs that day and no one else got the 2 dollars off that I did just by negotiating. To some this may sound like a “cheap skate” but I beg to differ. People work hard for their money and often things are simply over priced and I see no reason why you or I should be taken advantage. As a customer you have just as much right to make a price on a product or service as those offering the product or service because you are exactly half the deal, without you as a customer nothing can be sold which gives you every right to create the price.

Negotiating can be done just about anywhere:

Better Deal on Hotel Rooms?
On a road trip several years ago my family and I were checking in at a hotel, it was quite late. Now at the time I didn’t know that hotel rooms were negotiable but the desk clerk took it upon himself to make me a better offer for the room. I asked “you can do that” he went on to explain that desk clerks often have a minimum price for rooms and that they can offer it if it’s late or if too many rooms are available. I’ve almost never paid full price for a room since. You’ll almost always get an extra 10.00 ro 15.00 dollars off just by saying “Well how about this price?” when they tell you the room rate. Always go low. they say 89 you say 59, they will say the magic words “the lowest I can go is…” and that’s what you want to hear. Of course you’ll get a no deal from time to time but that’s ok because most of the time your going to get a better price.

Learning how to put this life skill in action will empower you and can save you thousands of dollars per year.

Always counter offer and make it low, even if they didn’t intend to negociate with you, they will naturally counter offer.

I guarantee that if you start using this process you will keep a lot of your hard earned money in your pocket.