Welcome to the wordpress guide!

This post is dedicated for my friend, Pearl, to solved her general problems on Wordpress. You will not found any beginner guide like how to install, how to make a post, how to change themes, or etc.

My goals in this post is to answer these following questions:

1. What Setting on Wordpress that you should have set?
2. What kind of Plugins that you *really* need to have?
3. How to Tweak your theme without making any word attempt on the template?

No time wasting, let’s get started and answer the first question:

Wordpress Setting:

Let’s open up your wp-admin/ Wordpress panel now. What you should look at now is the “option” tab. Select it, and wordpress will, give you more sub category to choose. Let’s see this picture:

Below is the setting that you should have done to your Wordpress along with the reason.

General Tab:

• Make sure to uncheck the “User must be registered & logged in to comment”
• Reason: Your reader will be annoyed by its registration process and change their mind to comment at your post

Reading Tab:

• Change your “show at most 10 posts” to around 5-8 posts maximum only.
• Reason: 1. Faster your blog main homepage download time; 2. Avoiding user being overload by the first page; 3. Make your index page looks good; 4. If your theme is using 3 column style that have the sidebar over the right, The menu will show up faster.
• Check the Full Text at your Syndication Feeds Option
• Reason: 9 out of 10 reader will unsubscribe from your feed if you don’t provide them your full feed. This happen the you when you use the <–more–> tag on your post.

• I would recommend you to check the “administrator must always approve comment”.
• Reason: You’ll be able to filter out any new spammer method that prove to be able to break though akismet and sometimes, user also spamming too! Checking this option allow you to moderate every comment that come and allow you to know where user are commenting.

Permalinks:

• Choose the radio button “Date and name based” and leave the rest on default.
• Reason: This is what SEOer called it “beautiful permalink” that ease google to index your blog. Avoid using the first one (?p=123), this type of link will confuse google’s robot and confuse your reader!

To let you know, Option tab will add more sub category on every time you activate plugins that put their costumizing panel in option tab. Like mine, I use more than 30 wordpress plugins together now. My option tab become as crowded as below picture:

Not all of them are nested on option tab, though. Some of them will nested below “Manage tab” or create a new tab like what “Contact Form” have done.

I think this should answer the first question. Next!

Wordpress Plugin:

Generally, Plugins can do 2 global things for you:

• First, they can add up your wordpress function to entertain and serve your reader.
• Second, they’ll make your reader run away or dislike some of your post

So, let’s conclude it as “good” and “bad” plugin overall. “Bad” doesn’t mean the author of the plugin is devilish! no! It’s because of some Psychology effects on your blog after applying “bad” plugin that will make your blog post unpopular.

Let’s begin with the “bad” plugin first:

I’m not going to tell the exact name, but will let you know you how these plugins are going to influence your readers mindset

Popularity contest-like plugins

This kind of plugin will make some of your unpopular post become more unpopular! You know… I’m not meany here. I can tell, readers are just like a bunch of sheep. if the found out your post have a low rate of reading (percentage, stars, or else), they’ll avoid it unconsciously!

I think you would want you reader to read every post without disturbed by the reading percentage, wouldn’t you?

Cloudy-like Plugins

These kind of plugins are interesting. It give you another kind of view toward your category, blogroll, links, etc. But, have you ever realize that you tend to click on the largest text instead of the smallest?

This kind of plugin would make your smallest text posts less valuable and less click from the user. So, please consider well before using…

Oke, how about the “good” plugin?

I have a collection of 30 plugins that I’m using them right now. I think they worth to try, but the main 10 plugins that you should have are as below:

1. Akismet
2. Wordpress Database backup
3. Subscribe to Comment
4. Show Top Commentators
5. PHP Exec
6. Recent Comments
7. Related Posts
8. Wordpress Sitemap Generator
9. Feedburner Feed Replacement
10. Optimal Title

Ok, I hope this mini guide should answer small part of the second question.

Next question is: “How to Tweak your theme without making any word attempt to the template?”

This question is rather hard to answer because tweaking will always have a high error rate. Let’s save it for the next post of exclusive discussion. I’ll choose one theme and tell you the shortcut to tweak it.

See you at the next post!

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