Shashank Rana

What did I first do after I installed WordPress on my GoDaddy shared hosting account?

I logged in to my account and found that I had to update the WordPress installation to 2.7.1 from 2.7. Thanks to the latest 2.7 version, this task is now automated. I remember downloading the WordPress files and uploading them one by one to my server to update it every time there was an update. Slow Internet and the GoDaddy limit of uploading one file at a time made the entire process very frustrating.

After the single click update, the first thing that I did was to change the default theme of the blog. It is important to make the blog look good, and that is one reason I moved from the Windows Live Spaces. WordPress offers hundreds of beautiful themes for the blog, making customizations easy.

It is not difficult to change the theme of the blog. There are hundreds of free and premium themes available online. You can Google for a good WordPress theme and then download it. It needs to be copied to the /wp-content/themes/ folder in your installation.

Once you have the theme copied, It will be available in the appearance menu in your blog’s admin panel.

After changing the theme, next most important thing is to check the URLs of the blog. It is a pity that if you will not change the URL (permalink) of your blog then they will appear in a machine like format

http://shashankrana.com/?p=100

To change these URLs, you need to have a few permissions from your webhost. If you manage your own server then there are no issues otherwise you may want to check before you activate permalinks for your blog. You need to check THIS POST HERE about Pretty Permalinks and then you can also check THIS POST HERE for the solution that I use. There are various ways of making your blog URL look readable. The ones here are easy and fast.

I will continue this in the next post. Do write in if you have any questions or a better way of doing things.