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1. Expectation Setting

what it is, and what its not

a blog or website are a continuous work in progress, technology changes, life changes, your blog or website will also require changes.

What are you offering

why should anyone visit your blog? what are visitors getting out of visiting your blog? start by offering something you know about and are comfortable with already.

domain name

hosting

Content Creation

Maintenance

Promoting

Monetizing

Resources and Support

Criteria:

Scalable

Simple, Responsive, Mobile Compatible

Decide on a Domain Name, an extension of your brand. This is your identifier in the marketing and business world.

The post How to Plan For a WordPress Blog appeared first on A Tech Apart.

Before we begin I suggest you do your prep work and Plan For a WordPress Blog. It’s a critical step, I recommend you not skip before proceeding.

 Let’s Get Started:

Step 1. Purchase a Domain Name and Hosting Package

I have been using hostmonster as my domain and hosting provider for the past couple of years. They have a solid tech support system, user friendly tools and affordable hosting solutions. For our purposes here though, they are also wordpress friendly which is why I recommend this hosting provider. You can get more info about hostmonster services by navigating to the Hostmonster Hosting Services Review.

Start by navigating over to hostmonster.com and click on ‘domain check’. Depending on if you did your homework or not before starting a blog, you’ll play around with finding a domain name for your blog here. Enter your desired domain name into the text field and click ‘next’ to see if it’s available. If it’s available, you’ll be brought to the following page where you can sign up and claim your domain by selecting a hosting package starting at around $60 for 12 months . Your best bet is to stick with the minimum offer, a 12 month package without any of the additional offers in case you decide to jump ship on your blog project early on, you won’t lose out much on a small investment.

Once you setup your account with hostmonster, login to your control panel with the username and password you signed up with, you can access your control panel through the hostmonster homepage. The tools and options in the control panel can be overwhelming to first time users, so I’ll help you cut through the clutter to complete setting up your wordpress blog.

Step 2. Setup Your Email Accounts

It’s important to set up your email because some wordpress functionality, mainly security plugins will need valid email access to operate properly.

We will create 2 emails, a backup email created specifically for automatic backups of your wordpress blog to be emailed to and stored. The other email will be your personal email account. Locate your mail settings by navigating to ‘Email Accounts’.

Enter all required fields, making sure you’re creating a strong password that is a mixed bag of numbers and letters, then click ‘Create Account’.

You will see that your account has been created by scrolling down, and you can access your email by scrolling over ‘More’, then clicking on ‘Access Webmail’.

Follow the same steps to create your personal email and move on to step 3.

Step 3. Install WordPress

Tools and items in the control panel are listed under a few categories.  Find ‘Software/Services’ and click on ‘Simple Scripts’.

Find and click on ‘WordPress’. On the following page, find and click on ‘install’. If it’s not already selected, find your domain name in the dropdown box to select it, skip the site name or title, uncheck all boxes for additional themes or features, check the ‘terms and conditions’ box and click on ‘complete’ to process the installation.

Once wordpress is finished installing to your domain name, you will be presented with the links to your blog homepage, the wordpress admin page, your username and password. Highlight and copy your password, click on the link to go to your admin page and login with the username and password provided.

Once you have logged in you will be presented with your wordpress dashboard. This is the cockpit of your wordpress blog. To view your blog homepage, hover over the top left of your dashboard to find your blog’s name and you’ll see the option to ‘Visit Site’.

Your blog is now up and running.

4. Basic WordPress Configurations

configure your permalink structure.

Next, you will want to Secure Your WordPress Blog.

Leave a comment below with any questions or feedback.

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1. Consider the Risks of Installing Pirated Plugins or Themes

This includes pirated plugins and themes from torrent sites, black hat sites, news groups etc. I know many starting out want to save money by pirating but what you may not know is that most of the files you pirate will harbor some sort of hack, injection, bug, virus or malware triggers that could seriously jeopardize all your hard work.

2. Create New Admin Profile with Scrambled Password

Login to your wordpress dashboard and navigate over to users to create a new user.

Type in all of the necessary information. When you go to put in your password, think of a meaningful password that you’ll remember, and scramble the password by substituting some of the letters with numbers and symbols. In this example, the password I want is ‘happyassdog’, so I put in the password fields ‘h4ppy@ssd0g’. This helps fight against brute force attacks. Lastly, remember to assign your role to ‘Administrator’ then click ‘Add New User’.

Now log out of your wordpress dashboard and log back in again, this time with your new username and password. Navigate to ‘Users’ again and delete the original user profile.

Now you will login to your wordpress dashboard using your new user login details moving forward.

3. Configure Scheduled Backups

Backups are critical, meaning you don’t want to cut any corners in this part of securing your wordpress blog or website. A solid backup solution can literally save you from disaster and have you back up and running with a stable wordpress in case anything happens. Take the tip, you’re dealing with technology, the possibilities for something to go wrong are endless so be proactive in your security implementation to cover your a$$.

We need to backup 3 items:

• The database file
• The wp-config file
• The wp-content folder

When it comes to a backup solution I suggest going with a reputable paid solution, such as ‘BackupBuddy‘. However, for this lesson, we’re going to install two free plugins named ‘WP-DB-Backup‘ and ‘BackWPup‘ that satisfy our main objective.

Download and activate the plugins by using the plugin search in your wordpress dashboard and searching each plugin by name. The plugin search can be anal, you’ll want to type in the names exactly as they have been typed out above so they show up in the search results.

Once you’ve downloaded and activated the plugins, navigate to your ‘Tools’ menu option and click on ‘Backup’ to schedule the first round of backups through WP-DB-Manager.

Scroll down to ‘Scheduled Backup’ and schedule for ‘Once Daily’. In an earlier post, How to Setup a WordPress Blog in 4 Steps, we setup an email account to hold our backups named ‘backups@yourdomain.com’. This is the email you will put in the ‘Email backup to:’ field. Now click on ‘Schedule backup’ to start generating backups of your database file to your ‘backups@yourdomain.com’ email account. You can check in with your backup email inbox later on to verify that you do receive the backup file as you have scheduled.

Be aware the WP-DB-Backup plugin only makes a backup of your database, not your other files that contain your content, images, functionality files, etc. This basically means that the backup solution is a partial backup solution. We’re going to complete our backup solution by configuring the BackWPup plugin for more thorough coverage.

Navigate to BackWPup on the left hand menu in your dashboard, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Backup now!’.

You’ll notice new options appear beneath the BackWPup options. From that menu select ‘Add New Job’.

Give the job a name, such as ‘EmailBackup’ because this particular job will send a backup file to your email account. Also check off all options under ‘Job Tasks’ to generate a full backup package. Leave the ‘Backup File Creation’ settings as they are.

Further down the page we will select our ‘Job Destination’, for this lesson we will check off ‘Backup sent by e-mail’. Under ‘Log Files’ we will put our backup email address in the ‘Send log to e-mail address’ field, leave the rest of the settings as they are and click ‘Save Changes’.

Scroll back up to the top of the page to configure our email settings. Put in the backup email address to send the backup copy to. You can send a test email, however you may get an error message. Ignore the error message for now, the real test is whether you receive the backup package in your email or not.

Under ‘Send e-mail settings’ change the maximum file size to 0. You don’t want a file size cap because your file size will increase as your blog grows, otherwise if your blog grows beyond the file limitation set here, it won’t generate the backups because the file is too big. In ‘Sender e-mail address’ put another email such as your personal or administrator email. In the ‘Sender name’ field you want to put a meaningful identifier, you’ll see this in your email inbox letting you know what backup package it is. Leave ‘Sending method’ as it is and click ‘Save changes’. Once you save the changes on the top of the same page, you’ll see a link to ‘Run Now’. Click on the link to generate your first backup.

Now check your email to make sure the backup did go through, and if it did you’re all set with setting up your backup solution for your wordpress blog or website.

We’re not going to cover backup recovery for this lesson, you can learn more about backup recovery in ‘Backup Recovery’. All you need to know for now is that your important files are backed up and you can find it in your backup email inbox. With BackWPup you can also generate a scheduled backup to your dropbox account, I highly recommend setting this up similar to the way we set up the email job because dropbox will store your backup offsite for further protection.

4. Configure Akismet

Akismet protects your blog from comment and trackback spam. Without this plugin, you can guarantee yourself a growing infestation of spam comments that could rot your wordpress functionality once you publish to the web.

5. Install and Configure Login Lockdown

Login Lockdown records any attempt to login to your account and locks down the login after a certain amount of attempts have been reached within a specified period of time.

Download and activate ‘Login Lockdown’ through the plugins search field. That’s it.

There are some options for login lockdown you can find under the settings menu, however the default settings work for our purposes and add an extra layer of protection from invaders.

Table of Contents – The Basics

• How to Plan for a WordPress Blog
• How to Setup a WordPress Blog in 4 Steps
• How to Secure Your WordPress Blog
• How to Create a WordPress Child Theme
• How to Monetize Your WordPress Blog

The post How to Secure Your WordPress Blog appeared first on A Tech Apart.

Let’s get started:

From your hosting control panel, fire up ‘File Manager’. Navigate to your wordpress blog installation’s theme folder. Create a ‘New Folder’ inside the theme folder and call it something like ‘parenttheme-child’, where ‘parenttheme’ is replaced by the parent theme folder name you activated for your wordpress blog. In this example, I created a new folder called ‘twentytwelve-child’, the parent theme being ‘twentytwelve’, which is the theme I activated on my wordpress blog.

create a ‘New File’ inside the child theme folder, call it ‘style.css’ and click on ‘Create New File’. Right-click on the style.css file and select ‘Edit’ to open it.

copy and paste the code below into the style.css file.

/*
Theme Name: parenttheme-child
Template: parenttheme
Author: Your Name
*/
@import url("../parenttheme/style.css");

In the code above, replace ‘parenttheme’ with the name of your parent theme, otherwise you’ll run into errors when you go to activate your child theme. Save your changes.

Any styling code you put in this new style.css file beneath the code you just copied and pasted will now override or append to your parent theme’s styling.

Login to your parent theme dashboard and activate the new child theme.

Why a create a child theme?

• Provides an extra layer of protection, like dummyproofing your changes
• Testing purposes
• create different theme “skins”

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