Use open source to build your own online presence for nothing part two

David M Williams
Thursday, 15 November 2007 06:27

Business IT - Open Source

You can tell Google here about every web site you have. Actually, you can add any web site whatsoever, so Google asks you to verify you actually own that site by making a change – either by adding a file with a crazy, unique, name or by adding a meta tag. Choose the file option and note the filename it gives you. Leave Google open and use a text editor to make a file with that name and then use FileZilla to FTP it to your web host. Click the verify button on Google’s site; their spiders will go and check this page now exists and then confirm you as legitimate owner.

You now have some great resources available to you. Explore the webmaster tools; at the moment you’ll have no data, but you can see that, over time, Google will give you a good picture of how people are reaching your site – whether by links or searches – along with any problems your site might have which would prevent people accessing it.

You’ll also note a section where you can give Google a sitemap of your site; this is very useful and we’ll come back to this shortly when we discuss WordPress plugins.

Themes
It’s time now to switch our site from the regular WordPress appearance to something more appealing and in line with your site’s intentions.

Go back to your site’s home page and login to the WordPress dashboard. The fourth option listed is to change your site’s look or theme. You’ll be given a gallery of available themes – of which, out of the box, you get an entire two. Fear not, the WordPress community is exceedingly generous and there’s a rich suite of open source themes available at no cost.

Scroll down the page and you’ll find a link to the WordPress theme directory. Click it and browse through the themes to find one, or several, you like. You can search according to a variety of options, such as different numbers of columns. Be careful to change the matching option from “ANY” to “ALL” so that all your criteria apply (rather than any single one of them triggering a match.) You can give them test runs and when you finally choose some you like you can download them as zip files.

My needs are fairly conservative, so I’ve opted for something with two columns, a fluid width (don’t you just hate it when you have a widescreen 22” LCD monitor and web sites stick to 800x600 design?),  plugins and widgets support, an options page and a left sidebar. This gives me two choices, “misunderstood” and “white as milk”. I’m going with “white as milk”.

Unzip the themes, wherever you saved them, being sure to keep them in their own directory. So, in my case, I have the files under a folder “white-as-milk-10”. Fire up Filezilla again and upload these via FTP to your web host. Upload the whole folder to the wp-content/themes directory.

In your web browser, return to the theme gallery within your web site’s admin dashboard. Your new theme or themes will now be shown. Choose the one you want to go with and return to your site’s front page.

WordPress plugins
You now have a pretty good, basic, WordPress site up-and-running. You can use the dashboard to make blog entries or to make static pages. There is one page already, an About page, which has dummy content so you should begin by editing that.

However, to get more utility out of WordPress be sure to check out the excellent litany of free and open source plugins that are available.

The first plugin is absolutely invaluable; it comes with WordPress but needs some attention before it can be activated. It is called Akismet and will get rid of masses of comment spam so it need not bother you.