For those of you who have installed Wordpress 2.0.x or 2.1.1 or indeed Wordpress.com, there is the tremendous temptation to ‘play’ with the software to see what you can do. This article is for helping you to get started on customizing your blog.
How much ‘playing’ are you intending to do? A lot of the features can be changed but it depends on the theme you choose what functions you can alter. So if I may, I’d like to suggest a three step program for customizing your website.

1. When you installed the software, you would find in Presentation >>> Themes about 50 different themes (depending on your host) you can choose from initially. Look through the themes first then try to pick one or the elements of one that you like more than the others. Then use this to guide you in choosing which of the themes seems most pleasing to you.

2. If you really can’t find one, or if you would prefer another theme, you can visit http://themes.wordpress.net/ and have fun there. You will download a zip file. Expand that then upload the files to your domain.com/wp-content/theme folder as instructed by the them. Once uploaded, go to Presentation Themes again, and find it and click on the theme to activate it.

3. You can customize your layout using widgets. If your theme is widget enabled, then you can go to Presentation >>> Theme >>> Widgets sidebar (which are quite flexible). In the text widgets you can add html/java/javascript and such like. If you choose the better themes, you’ll find that the Theme has its own ‘settings’, too.

I will be adapting the above comments. I hope it helps you get your first blog up and running. Please note: a blog/CMS is, in my experience, a kind of evolving website with a hugely social dimension. Both of these separate it from a traditional static website in a number of ways, but with the tools available, you can drive a lot more traffic to your site. In other words, you get visitors! The last and critical aspect that makes a blog/CMS owner happy is that the content and the design are largely separated, so you can work on one without worrying too much about the other: they take care of themselves.

That’s it. Three easy steps to customising your first Wordpress blog. Once you’re familiar with these three steps, I will provide more tips on how to tweak your theme, customise your website and where to find more help. I hope it helps you get your first blog up and running.

Ken Villines 1.0 ‘s website has two great plugins, Draft Control and Post Control, for the management of multiple posts either in draft form or already published. These plugins were favorites of mine simply because they make mass editing much more convenient. I used to use Draft Control version 0.96 but found that it was incompatible with later versions of WP 2.0.x. I thought the author hadn’t updated the plugin, but then recently found that he had updated and added Post Control, too. So two great plugins!

The functionality is added in the Manage button. Once there, you will see the features added in the bar. Also, functionality is similar between the plugins. You can mass-edit a group of posts, publish/unpublish, categorize or delete at will.

There is a useful toggle feature for all posts that can be found at the bottom of each page, allowing you to mass-edit every post on the page. Nice!

The only aspect that puzzled me, and perhaps that is a limitation of the system, is that posts can only be assigned or reassigned to ONE category at a time. So, if you regular post across categories, you may find that the tools screw up your categories by forcing you to choose one category only. This may or may not be a concern for you. I suspect that the limitation may be due to design.

Otherwise I’d reckon this to be an extremely useful tool for those with larger blogs looking for a way to mass edit posts. Or for bloggers who create a mass of drafts as the muse strikes.

Bla.st Blog recently raised the use of domain names: Which is better, using mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com?

I agree with their analysis of the problem: having two slightly different URLs under Google could in fact lead to dilution of your PR Rank. In fact, until recently IB here had this problem. Recently, my webhost attempted to solve this issue by giving its customers the choice as follows:

I have been suggesting my customers to choose one, usually the one with the higher PR rank as the default. Why argue with a good thing?

You can check your page rank for your blog name and see what happens when you enter your domain name +/- www. I don’t think it matters that much which one you decide on, but in my explorations I did notice that some versions of SMF did NOT like having two addresses. In fact when members visited SMF via the wrong URL, it produced an error. I followed my host’s advice and the problem went away, when I set it to the same as the address in the SMF configuration file.

If you get a chance, do a survey on Google Search and with your readers/customers/members to find out which is more popular or more preferred. But once you change, don’t flip back again. It could backfire!