A WordPress Blog can be run on a free server or on a paid one. Some differences apply, free servers usually are quite limited in their ability to allow you to use the full range of WordPress capacities, and therefore I will skip the free host installation and concentrate on the owned server WordPress installation. You can use this manual to install WordPress on a free Server but you may not be able to do all the things discussed here!

Table of Content:

1. Web Hosting Service and Domain Name Server
2. HTML and FTP Software you will need
3. Prepare WordPress for upload and activation
4. WordPress Theme
5. Nice URLs .htaccess
6. Robots.txt
7. WordPress Plugins
8. Start Writing

1. Website Host and Domain Name Server

Web Hosting Service
A web hosting service is an Internet service that allows you to store your own website or Blog on a disc drive accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide disc space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity.
Best thing is to look for one which allows package upgrades upon need.
I have chosen Hostloco. Some of their most interesting packages are:

The Hostloco Support Team replies within 24 hours, solving any trouble you might be running into when trying to setup your new account.
Once youve chosen a package and your account is activated you will receive an e-mail with the information about how to access your account and how to set it up.
The following information is crucial and you should keep it very safe:

Domain: yourdomain.com
This is a username only, if you have no DNS server you will have to get one and use the Nameserver 1 and 2 to forward to this domain.
IP-addresse: 100.10.120.40
FTP-Server: 100.10.120.40
With these IP addresses you can reach your Web space at hostloco.com at any time.
Username for FTP: @yourdomain.com
Password: your password
POP3-Server: mail.yourdomain.com
SMTP-Server: mail.yourdomain.com
Webmail: http://www.yourdomain.com/tuxwebmail/
If you would like to use Outlook, use the POP3 and SMTP Servers to configure the account. The info@yourdomain.com e-mail is default.
Administration: http://www.tuxlogin.com
Nameserver 1: ns.primary-ns.net
Nameserver 2: ns.secondary-ns.net

Tuxtools
Hostloco is using Tuxtools to manage Web space. Tuxtools is quite intuitive and easy to use.
Once you log in (English, German or Spanish) you will see three tabs. Account tools, Server tools and Software tools.
You can set up your email accounts here. If you have chosen a package with sub domains you can set them up here as well.

Creating a Database on a Server
To prepare the Server for the installation of WordPress you have to create a database.
To do this go to the Software tools tab and choose Add database in the left column.
Add a name in the Name of database field and click on the add button. Make sure you write down the name for later use, so that you dont have to come back here and login to find it out. You will need this name later when configuring WordPress wp-config file.
Now click on Add user. You will be prompted to add a username for the database. Choose a name and write it down. Click ok.
Click on Database Overview. You should see Database Name you database name; Database User Empty; Option Assign User.
Select the name and click on Change.
Now you should see your database username under Database User.
It could be that the association and activation of the database takes a moment. Mine was functioning after about 10 minutes.
That is all there is to do on the Web Host.

2 Domain Name Servers

Besides the Website Host you do also need a Domain Name Server. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system for any resource participating in the Internet like Web Hosting Services. It associates information with domain names assigned to such participants. Most importantly, it translates textual domain names to the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment to locate and address it.

Ive chosen name.com. With 4,25 per year it is one of the cheapest Domain Name Servers around. Once you have registered with them and chosen you domain name (like above called yourdomain.com) all there is left to do is log in and go to the Edit Name Servers tab. Delete the existing entries and add the ones given to you by your web host. In my case this would be:

Nameserver 1: ns.primary-ns.net
Nameserver 2: ns.secondary-ns.net

This will tell the Name Server to connect to your personal web space (in my case hostloco.com) where your Blog is hosted.
That is all. No need for any other configuration. Now you should try the new setup. Open your Web browser and type http://yourname.com. Since there is not jet any data on your Host it should come up with an empty page or with a server typical message saying something like This Site is under Construction. If you get a 404 Not found message something went wrong and you will have to check all your settings again. Just go through the list.

1. Username on Web server correct?
2. Nameserver 1 and 2 correct?
3. Domain name is as username at Web server?

If this fails please contact customer support of your service providers.

3 Prepare WordPress for upload and activation What you Need

Once the Web Host and DNS is ready and running, you can download WordPress at http://wordpress.org/download/.

At this point I would like to mention the importance of a well structured filing system in your My Documents folder.
Working with WordPress you will download a lot of stuff. You will create Images, maybe Sound or Music files; you will store Plugins and a lot of other things.
To be able to easily find and manage all these files it is very important to maintain a clear and easily accessible filing structure.
Here the Example for my filing structure (I am using 4 WordPress installations for the four languages I publish in):

My Files

My Webs

German

Posts
Subfolder for each Post

English

Posts
Subfolder for each Post

Spanish

Posts
Subfolder for each Post

French

Posts
Subfolder for each Post
 

Uploaded Images
Uploaded Music
Uploaded Files

WordPress

Plugins
WordPress x.x

Never Upload

This structure allows me to quickly access files without having to do searches. The Never Upload folder contains Script files and example files that I am using but which must not end up in a post or on the Web Server!!

List of Free Programs you will be using when working with WordPress

• ACE FTP (to upload files to your server)
• ACE HTML (to edit some code, to make your Posts look nicer)
• Bulk File Rename Utility (to rename series of images or files, fast way, before uploading to your Server)
• Bulk Resize JPG Images (to get your JPG Images downsized, fast and all at once.

If you have Microsoft Word or any other Text Processing Program with Spell Checking, then use it to make sure that your Posts are published without orthographical and grammatical errors.
If you are using IE7 you might want to consider the use of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome to see the differences in the appearance of your posts. (Ive noticed some slight differences between IE7 and Firefox, especially Fonts)

With the exception of Microsoft Word, ALL of the above Programs are absolutely free to download under GNU GPL license.

Configuring ACEFTP:
Run ACEFTP Freeware. Click on the FTP Icon on the top left. Double click on New Site Profile. Enter a Name for your Site.
Important Fields:
Server: Put your FTP IP address here
Port: leave as is
Protocol: leave as is
User ID: This is the FTP user ID you have received in the email from your Web Host. It could look something like @yourname.com
Password: your Password
Click Ok and you are ready for your first FTP connection.

Open the WordPress Zip file and unzip the package to the WordPress folder.
Open up wp-config-sample.php with ACE HTML and fill in your database connection details.

These are:
DB_NAME the name you gave your Database when you created it
DB_USER the username you selected before
DB_PASSWORD your password

Now write some phrase in the three fields AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY AND LOGGED_IN_KEY. You can write anything you want here. You will not be asked for this information later on.

Save the file as wp-config.php
Upload everything with your ACE FTP program.
Open http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php in your browser. This should setup the tables needed for your Blog. If there is an error, double check your wp-config.php file, and try again. If it fails again, please go to the WordPress Support Forums with as much data as you can gather.
Note the password given to you.
The install script should then send you to the login page. Sign in with the username admin and the password generated during the installation. You can then click on ‘Profile’ to change the password.

Delete the default post and maybe the default About page, because they might get crawled and indexed by Google.

4 WordPress Theme

WordPress comes by default with 2 themes. You may want to change to something more adapted to your design preferences. Have a look at the huge WordPress Theme Collection. They have almost 300 themes available for free download. There are lots of other themes out there on the internet. Make sure the Theme you choose is Widget ready. If you want to monetize your Blog you should make sure that your Theme is AdSense ready.

Ive changed my theme four times. On my old Blog you can see my first theme. On this Blog I was using a two column theme with one column on the left and another one on the right. But the theme was not AdSense ready. To integrate AdSense into a non AdSense ready theme implies the need for PHP Code editing. Since I dont have the time to learn PHP in depth I did run into quite a lot of limitations and trouble. So I googled for something to make my life easier. I found the AdSense Prosense theme and opted for it for its simplicity and ease of use. I have translated this theme to French, German and Spanish and am using it in my four Blogs.

5 Nice URLs and .htaccess

By default WordPress uses URLs that look something like this: http://mydomain.com/?p=210.
There is an Option to change the looks of these URLs. To change these settings go to your Dashboard, chose Settings then Permalinks. Under Common Settings you will find 5 different options. My favourite Option for the way URLs will be shown is the Custom Structure. It allows you to define yourself how URLs should be shown.
I have selected /%category%/%postname%
This will make a specific URL show like this:

http://ralfengel.com/wordpress/wordpress-prosense-theme-translated-german-french-spanish

If you would like to use this URL format, copy

/%category%/%postname%

and paste it into the field Custom Structure.
Click on the Save Changes Button. You might receive a message stating that your .htaccess file is not writable. Use your FTP program and log on to your server. Find the .htaccess file. It could be that there is no .htaccess file so you will have to create on.
To create the .htaccess file use WordPad and save the following text to your My Web folder using htacc.ess as file name (windows does not allow you to save .htaccess). Once uploaded rename it to .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Upload the file to your root directory. Now you should be able to use Pretty URLs.

6 Robots.txt

Spiders like GoogleBot are constantly crawling the World Wide Web. Sooner or later they will crawl your Site as well. To make sure that these spiders only index the pages and folders you want them to, you have to ad a robots.txt file to the root of your Site. The robots.txt file lets spiders know what to look for and what to ignore. This applies for friendly spiders like GoogleBot only. Some Evil or Harvester Spiders are only out there to collect information like emails for spamming or other information.

Here an example of my robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /files/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /music/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

There is no need for the spiders to index folders which contain data that you have already integrated on a Post or the configuration and program files which Worpress uses to run. Allowing Spiders to do so will create double content. According to Google Webmaster Tools this is noting fatal, but should be avoided. Just in case make sure you allow only folders that have content inside you want to get crawled and indexed.

7 WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins are used to extend the functionality of WordPress. As is WordPress already has all the basic functions integrated into it. Nevertheless, some users have special needs. Plugins can be found for WordPress for almost anything you can imagine.
I am using several Plugins that I think are quite important. Here is the list of Plugins I use and a short description of what they do as well as their download link:

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. To get the API key you have to register at WordPress.com. Once you Account has been activated sign in and navigate to – My Account – Global Dashboard -. Locate “Profile” on the right of the screen and click on it.
Almost at the top of the new window you will find your Akismet Key.

You can review the spam it catches under Comments. To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg. Akismet comes along with WordPress, no need for Download.

All in One SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Pack
This Plugin for your WordPress Blog By Michael Torbert is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.
Download Plugin here.

Audio Player
This Plugin allows you to reproduce MP3 Music files. It is a highly configurable single track mp3 player created by By Martin Laine. Its use is quite simple.
Insert the following line into your post, upload your music to the corresponding folder, choose to loop and autostart. Ready!

[audio:http://yourdomain.com/yourmusicfolder/filename.mp3|autostart=yes|loop=yes]

If you do not desire autostart change autostart=yes to autostart=no. The same accounts for loop.
Download here.

Exec-PHP
This Plugin executes <?php ?> code in your posts, pages and text widgets. It was created by Sren Weber. I use it sometimes to include Carp News feeds in an Article.
Download Plugin here.

Google Analytics
This Plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog. Google Analytics is a Service which allows you to view very detailed Visitor and Page View data of your Blog.
Download Plugin here. If the Download link does not work visit http://boakes.org/software.

Google XML Sitemaps
This Plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. A Sitemap tell Search Engines the exact location of your Posts as well as of the pages of your Blog. Using a Sitemap can accelerate the Indexing of your Blog.
Download here.

InstantUpgrade
Every once in a while WordPress releases a new Version of the WordPress Blogging Software. The procedure of manually upgrading your WordPress installation is quite complex and long. This Plugin is almost completely automated. You should only use this Plugin in combination with WordPress Database Backup (further down), since Upgrading is somewhat complex. I have used it and it worked perfectly. This is a beta version.
After upload and activation you may have to use your FTP program to access the /wp-content/plugins/instantupgrade/ folder. Select the work folder, right click on it and set the CHMOD value to 777. Select all fields. Click OK. This enables Instant Upgrade to read, write and execute necessary files inside the work folder.
Download Here.

Related Posts
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Add the following command line to your posts to display Related Posts:

<?php related_posts(); ?>

Download Plugin here.

Robots Meta
This is a SEO Plugin that allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links. It helps to make your Blog look better to the big Search Engines.
Download here.

Rodneys Kontera DynamiContext Plugin
This Plugin facilitates Kontera DynamiContext ads. Once configured the ads are added automatically. A popup window with context related publicity will be shown to Visitors who move the mouse over a highlighted word.
Download here. Signup here.

Simple Tags
The Simple Tag Plugin allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. You can use it with any blogging tool/method, not just when posting from WordPress itself (doesnt use custom fields). Supports multiple words within tags.
Also allows in-post tagging of words by enclosing them in [tag] tags.
I have modified this plugin so that it does not create a Technocrati related search leaving your Blog but rather keeps visitors on the Site, executing a Search on Tag word related Posts. To do this you will have to edit the plugin.
Open simpletags.php with Ace HTML, on line 31 eliminate the word Technocrati to see

$pre_replacement = <p>Tags: ;

Further change line 43 to see

$tag_url = “http://yourdomain.com/index.php?s=”;

Save the file and upload it. Now you can use this command line in your posts:

Tags: word1, word2, word3, word4

Download here.

WordPress Database Backup
A must have Plugin that allows you to do one click database backups with no hassle. Backups can be downloaded, saved on server or emailed. Backups can be scheduled. Easy to use, just upload and activate, then navigate to Manage Backup and follow the instructions.
Download Plugin here.

WP Polls
This Plugin ads an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPresss Blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
Download here.

8 Start Writing

Now it is time to get creative. Start writing your Articles and Posts. Try to publish articles with at least 1000 words to draw the attention of Search Engines. When you add images to your posts you can use some formatting. Notice the image floating on the right with text wrapping around it? To do this use the following code:

<div style=”float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;”>
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/imagefolder/name.jpg” title=”write image title here”>
<img src=”http:// yourdomain.com/imagefolder/name thumb.jpg” alt=”" style=”border: solid 2px #000000;” width=”150″ /></a>
<br />
</span>
</div>

You will notice that there is a name thumb.jpg within the code. I have uploaded all my images after resizing them using Bulk Resize Images and then I have created thumbnail size images from the originals. What you see here is a thumbnail image with 150 pixels, the original image is 500 pixels wide. Displaying many images on one page with large size will make the page take a long time to open.

You can use tables inside your posts
To add a table within a post use the following code:

<table border=”1″ cellpadding=”2″ style=”border-collapse: collapse” bordercolor=”#111111″ width=”80%” height=”40″ bgcolor=”#C0C0C0″>
<tr>
<td width=”100%”>table text here</td>
</tr>
</table>

This is what the above code will produce:

Within the code you can change variables like width, height, bordercolor, background color, table border width and many more.

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I am running a WordPress Blog since quite a while now. It used to be hosted on a free server. Since I always liked to publish in my four favourite languages, I decided to get my own Website Host at Hostloco.com with a proper domain name and subdomains to run an individual language version for English, Spanish, German and French.

Since Im using Adsense to monetize my Blog a little, I was looking around for a really well working, easy to use (no need for php or html code programming) theme, Adsense ready.

With the ProSense theme I found exactly what I wanted. Header, Footer, Sidebar, all ready with Adsense code integrated. The only thing left to do was to change my Adsense Publisher ID, that was all.

This is the list of the most important features of ProSense:

Separate and Distinct Ad Blocks. The use of distinct theme files for ad codes allows for easy editing and insertion of Adsense units. These ad blocks can also be used to insert other types of advertisements as well and are not solely limited to Adsense use.
Multiple Ad Display Options. Unlike other Adsense Ready themes, ProSense allows you to choose between either banner or rectangle ads for the single post page, thus allowing you more flexibility when it comes to ad blending.
Hassle-free convenience and ease of use. Youll only have to insert your AdSense publisher ID in the default ad units and youre done. It should only take a minute or two to set up ProSense perfectly.
Integrated Ad placement on the homepage. Unlike most AdSense ready themes currently available, ProSense blends a 468 x 60 banner unit between the second and third post on the blog homepage.
This enables you to display relevant ads to search visitors who arrive at your homepage, as they are more likely to scroll and scan through your posts. The inclusion of a well-blended horizontal link unit near the top of the homepage also attracts navigational-style visitor clicks.
Highly Optimized Ad units on post pages. There are two types of ad blocks on both the top and bottom of the single post page. You can choose between using a 468 x 60 banner and 300 x 250 rectangle at the top of the post or a 468 x 60 banner and 336 x 280 large rectangle at the bottom of the post.
The ability to designate and match different ad units is exclusive to ProSense and is currently not available for other AdSense Ready themes.
Pre-blended AdSense unit colours. All AdSense unit colours are tweaked to match the blogs link and background colours. There is absolutely no need for you to spend time picking the appropriate ad colours.
Search Engine Optimized site structure. ProSense is built from good, clean code that validates well. The CSS positioning is written so that your blog content is prioritized in the source code as this may help to improve search engine crawling and ranking. Dynamic and descriptive title tags are also used for each blog page.
Compatible with WordPress 2.0+. ProSense has been tested with the latest 2.2 Getz version of WordPress and no problems were experienced.
Widget-Ready. If youre a widget lover, youll be happy to know that ProSense allows you to easily install and use widgets to complement your content and advertising scheme.

For now I have only translated the Basic ProSense Theme (Brown Colour). If I find the time Ill have a look at the other ProSense colour schemes.
Download AdSense Prosense German Theme!
Download AdSense Prosense Spanish Theme!
Download AdSense Prosense French Theme!

If you find any translation errors please send me a feedback using my Contact page.

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