How to Create a Photography Blog

Whether you are an aspiring photographer or a full-time pro, a blog can help you showcase your work and connect with your viewers, fans and potential clients. In these series of articles, I will show you how to create a photography blog from scratch – from buying a domain and hosting, to installing the most popular blog platform in the world known called “WordPress”. I decided to do this because I know that many photographers simply don’t have the technical know-how to create and manage a blog, while others don’t have the financial means to pay for the installation, configuration and customization of WordPress. Once you get your own blog up and running, you will be able to perform routine maintenance yourself, instead of relying on someone else.

Since this is going to be a rather large tutorial/howto, I decided to split it into several parts. In part 1, I will provide some basic information on domains, hosting, databases and content management systems. I will also go through the process of purchasing a domain together with a hosting account, then will set up a hosting account with a database. In part 2, I will go through WordPress installation and initial configuration. In part 3, we will deal with some customization and basic plugins, while Part 4 is going to be on themes and templates that you can use with WordPress. I will obviously try to explain everything in very simple terms, assuming that the reader has no prior knowledge of the Web. Let’s get started!

1) How Websites Work

Before delving into some blogging verbiage, let me first explain how websites work in general. Every time you open up your browser and type in a website, or find a website through search engines like Google and Yahoo, your computer obtains some information about the website on the Internet and then connects to a particular server that hosts that website. The particular server I am referring to has a unique address on the Internet and that’s how it is found. Ever heard of a term “IP address”? When computers and servers communicate on the Internet, they find each other through unique IP addresses that look like a bunch of numbers with dots in between – something like 55.66.77.88. Since those numbers are hard to remember, domains like “.com” were invented. Thanks to those domains, you just need to know the address of a website like “cnn.com” or “mansurovs.com” and you can get to a website without even knowing the IP address of the machine that hosts that website on the Internet. This domain name to IP translation happens through Domain Name Servers (DNS) on the Internet, the sole purpose of which is to convert domain names to IP addresses. Here is how the actual communication takes place:

1. Once you type the website address/domain on your browser (client), it looks up the IP address of the server that hosts the requested website (through a DNS server).
2. Your browser then contacts the server through the IP address and sends some information to the server about what page/URL is being requested.
3. The server processes the request and outputs a webpage, which then gets fetched by your browser.
4. Your browser goes through the content and then parses it in a nice, readable format for you.

This client/server communication is very similar to a restaurant (as an analogy). The client (your web browser) goes to a restaurant and places an order for food from a waiter (the server). The waiter takes the oder and remembers the location (IP address) where the client sits. Once the food is ready, the waiter brings it out to the client. To be more efficient, the waiter serves multiple clients. Similar to this waiter, Internet servers are also meant to serve many clients and requests, not just one. For example, our website is visited by tens of thousands of visitors every day and we have one server that handles all those requests.

Why is the above information important? Because as a future website/blog owner and operator, you need to understand these basics of Internet communication.

2) Introduction to Content Management Systems (CMS)

Now that you know how websites work, let me give you a very quick tour of what content management systems are and how most modern blogs work today. Every time you visit a website on the Internet, the content that your browser receives from the server that hosts that blog is coded in one or more Internet languages that your browser can understand, parse and display for you. Historically, being able to publish content on the Internet required a lot of technical skills, because you had to know how to program in those languages. Every time you wanted to upload an article on your website, you would have to write a separate page in that language and publish it one by one. Overtime, it became a maintenance nightmare for website owners, because they had thousands of custom-written pages that were extremely hard to modify. If owners wanted to change the layout of their website or make modifications to all pages, they had to go through each page one at a time, which was a very inefficient and expensive process.

Some programmers and website developers realized this problem and came up with an idea – why not store content in a dynamic system with a database to store all the content (which would eliminate the need to program individual pages) and find a way to use templates to manage the look of the website, so that the appearance and the layout of the webpages could be changed automatically. That’s how the first “Content Management Systems” (CMS) were born. With these systems, the cost and the time to maintain websites went down dramatically and CMS systems quickly gained popularity on the Internet. But those CMS systems were hard to set up and required some coding experience to maintain them, which limited the use of CMS to only those, that could afford paying programmers to publish content. This eventually led to the creation of blog platforms – the aim of which was to provide a simple foundation for ordinary “non-techies” to publish content on the Internet. Blogs also offered a different format of presenting the content. Instead of serving pages in a traditional way with hard links and navigations, blogs displayed dynamic content like in news sites, with the fresh content on the top of the page. Compared to complex CMS systems, blogs were free to download and use, were relatively easy to set up and did not require any knowledge of programming languages to post content – special “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editors made it easy to perform simple functions directly from browsers. In addition, most blog platforms were open-source (meaning anybody can make changes to source code) and were designed to run on MySQL database and PHP scripting language, both of which are also free and comparably easy to learn. This meant that anybody could add and change the code, which resulted in communities of developers, who collaboratively worked together to enhance the blog platform and make it better. Next, something big called “blog revolution” happened. That’s when blogs went mainstream and thousands of blogs started appearing all over the Internet. All of a sudden, many website owners started turning away from their old “static” content and started evaluating different blog platforms to transition their websites to a better and a more flexible platform to cut down their costs and start focusing on the content, while providing a different navigation experience to their visitors.

3) WordPress and its success

As CMS systems gained more popularity and the blog platform got kicked off, many different variations of blog systems started appearing on the Internet. While adoption of blog platforms between tech-savvy users was quite high, most blog systems were still hard to get going, even for people with some technical experience. Blog systems seemed to lack one component – simplicity. That’s when a young kid by the name of Matt Mullenweg came up with an idea to write a very simple blog system that was easy to set up and configure. And WordPress was born.

I remember the day when I met Matt at a conference in 2005. Back then, I was playing with a really old version of WordPress and I had many complaints about it. I discussed some of my frustrations with Matt and he told me that he was working on many of those problems already and that the next releases of WordPress would address some of my concerns. I had some challenges with the initial WordPress versions and I even thought about creating my own blog system just to run my blog (which I obviously did not have the time or resources to do, so my idea never materialized). I waited for the new version of WordPress and indeed, many of the discussed items such as ability to upload images were released in the next version. Overtime, WordPress got better and better, while its installation process pretty much remained the same – a one button click to get it installed and configured. And that was the major reason why WordPress was getting adopted very quickly. Simplicity. Always. Wins. Whether you were a programming guru or a novice, all you had to do was upload some files and run an installation script and voila – your blog was ready to go. In just several years, WordPress became the most popular blog platform on the Internet. It still is today.

With its latest releases, WordPress is not a simple blogging tool that it used to be several years ago anymore, but a product that rivals even some of the most powerful Content Management Systems.

4) Why use WordPress for your photography blog

Besides being the #1 platform for blogging, what are the reasons why you as a photographer should choose WordPress as a blog platform? Here are some of the reasons why I believe WordPress is a good fit for photographers:

1. It is easy to set up and configure.
2. Once you learn the basics, publishing media content is a simple process.
3. In the long term, WordPress is easy to manage and maintain.
4. Photographers work heavily with images. WordPress has a powerful media upload/management tool for images and videos. Although the image processing/resizing feature is not optimized for quality, it can be tweaked a little to work better. With the help of some plugins, images can be presented to clients for viewing in a neat way.
5. It is highly customizable through templates and plugins. Thousands of templates and plugins are readily available for free, with some very good commercial options developed specifically for photographers.
6. It can be tightly integrated with social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
7. It is search engine friendly and there are some great ways to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
8. It has lots of built-in functionality and some external tools to convert from other popular blogging platforms (in case your blog is currently hosted elsewhere).
9. It looks nice and clean.
10. It has the biggest community of developers that constantly work on improving it and adding more features.
11. Considering the community size and millions of blogs that use the same platform all over the Internet, WordPress has a good future. So you don’t have to worry about spending your time on a system that will have no support tomorrow.
12. It is free.

I’m sure there are other reasons/advantages, but I consider the above to be the most important.

5) Hosted vs Self-hosted Blog

The big question many potential blog owners ask, is whether they should use a hosted solution or a self-hosted solution. Let me go over these and their differences really quick. Most hosted blog solutions are free – websites such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com offer a great way to start a blog without paying anything for it. Your blog is automatically set up and hosted for you and a list of templates is readily available to choose from. Because these large blog websites are hosted on very reliable networks, chance of problems such as potential downtime are very low and the overall responsiveness and the speed are also very high. But hosted blog systems have one big limitation – they do not allow blog owners to add new features or change existing ones. Also, if you wanted to have your own unique style and a customized theme, you would not be able to use it in a hosted environment. At the same time, due to tight control on the blog functionality, hosted blogs have a very low risk of failure due to user error. You would have to try hard to break a hosted blog.

On the other hand, a self-hosted blog gives you all the freedom to do basically whatever you want. You can get whatever plugin or theme you want to install and change the site appearance completely. On the negative side, if anything goes wrong, your site could potentially be inaccessible to your visitors. Obviously, a self-hosted blog means that you would have to pay for hosting it on the Internet.

Here is a short summary of advantages and disadvantages of both:
Advantages of a hosted solution (like WordPress.com)

1. Reliable service
2. Low-risk hosting
3. High uptime and fast speeds
4. Able to handle high loads and lots of traffic
5. Automatic setup that does not require any technical/programming skills
6. Comes with plenty of functionality to start a blog
7. Automatically pre-configured for you
8. Great tools to import blogs from other blog platforms
9. Free, unless premium services are used

Disadvantages of a hosted solution:

1. No flexibility to install new features and themes
2. Minimal control over site layout and functionality
3. Slow to changes and new features
4. Advertising is not allowed

Advantages of a self-hosted solution

1. Highly flexible and customizable
2. Can add/use any features/plugins and themes
3. Ability to sell advertising anywhere on the site, including feeds
4. Full access to WordPress files
5. Ability to run the latest versions of WordPress core files (including beta releases) and plugins
6. Can run multiple blogs from the same installation (WordPress multi-user)

Disadvantages of a self-hosted solution

1. Requires purchase of a domain and hosting
2. Blog can be prone to hacking, if not updated regularly
3. Some bad plugins and custom themes can break site functionality
4. Uptime and speed depend on the hosting provider

The biggest drawback of a hosted solution is inability to use your own custom themes and plugins. While there are companies that offer better hosted solutions for photographers, the flexibility to use plugins and themes of your choice is still not there, mainly due to high risk of a potential failure. If you are serious about your photography and want to run a photography business, you should definitely choose a self-hosted solution. It is certainly more work to have a hosted solution, but don’t forget that your website is your face and your image – your clients will certainly notice it.

6) Total cost of a self-hosted solution

Before you continue any further, you have to get a good understanding of the cost of owning a self-hosted WordPress installation. While hosting prices really depend on hosting companies and their pricing models, I will be particularly focusing on one company I personally use for my hosting needs – GoDaddy.com. I am not affiliated with GoDaddy in any way. I just like the pricing, service and overall value of their services. Talking about value, their domain + hosting packages are very cheap, certainly some of the lowest in the industry. If you do not currently your own domain like yourphotography.com, I would buy both a domain and a hosting package directly from GoDaddy. Commercial .com domains are just $11.99 per year and if that’s too expensive for you, you can get a .info domain for even less.

Here are the three hosting packages the company offers:

The Economy package is good enough for most people and you can always upgrade to Deluxe or Ultimate packages, if you need more storage later. As you can see, it can get as low as $2.99 per month for hosting if you pay for 3 years of service, which is dirt cheap. If you want to try it out and see how far you can get, just go with the 1 month or 3 month service and see if you like it or not. You can prolong your hosting service later.

In summary, if you were to buy a domain plus hosting from GoDaddy.com, your annual cost would depend on the length of the hosting plan you selected. For example, if you go with a 12 month Deluxe hosting plan with a domain, your total cost is $11.99 (domain) + $83.88 ($6.99×12) = $95.87 – less than a hundred bucks for the entire year!

7) Purchasing a domain and hosting

If you have made up your mind to buy a domain and a hosting account, here is what you need to do:

1. Go to www.godaddy.com and type the domain name you want to buy on the main page. You will have to find a domain name that is not used by anybody else, so you might end up spending some time looking for a good domain name. Here is where you type the name of domain to search on the main page:

   

2. If the domain you searched for is available, the next page will indicate that you can purchase the domain. Click the “Add” button to add the domain to your shopping cart.
3. The next step is fill out a Registration form, where GoDaddy will ask you for your personal information such as name, address, etc., so click the orange “Continue to Registration” button.
4. You will probably get a screen with some additional offers, such as purchasing .net, .org and other similar domains – just click “No Thanks” on the bottom and you will be taken to the registration form.
5. Fill out the registration form and proceed to domain settings and then Privacy/Domain Protection. Don’t worry about any of these and just click “Next”.
6. In step #4, you will have an option to add email and hosting. Scroll down to “Add Website and Hosting” and pick either “Web Hosting Economy” or “Web Hosting Deluxe”, then click the orange “Add” button. The status should change to “Pending Purchase” as seen below:
   
   The default hosting plan is “Linux”, which works great for WordPress hosting.
7. Click “Next” and finish up the Checkout process. While checking out, you will be able to create a username and password to access your GoDaddy.com account.
8. Once you complete your purchase, you will receive an email with order confirmation.

What if you already own a domain? If you bought it through GoDaddy.com, all you have to do is login to your GoDaddy dashboard, then add a hosting account to your domain. If you bought a domain through somebody else, then the process would require you to transfer it from your current domain registrar (the company you bought the domain from) to GoDaddy. Look up domain transfer instructions on both your registrar’s website and GoDaddy and follow the process. Depending on your registrar, the process might be fairly straightforward to somewhat complex. If you are not comfortable with the process, simply call your registrar and they should be able to help you. GoDaddy.com has a great phone support, so you can call them to get instructions and help with the domain transfer process as well.

8) Hosting Account – Initial Setup

Now that you have the domain and your hosting plan purchased, you need to set some things up for WordPress to work. Start by logging into your WordPress account, then see if “Web Hosting” is already listed under “Products” as shown below:

If you do not see it yet, wait a few minutes and refresh the page you are on. Once your web hosting account is created by GoDaddy, you should see the above link that says “Set up now!”. Click the link and you will be taken to the Hosting Account Center, where you will have to go through some steps to set up your hosting account. Here is the initial screen:

Click next, then set up your account login/password that you will be using to access the Hosting Account Center. Don’t forget to write down the username and password, since you will need it to access your account later. Next, under “Account Details”, choose “Select from existing:” and pick your domain name that will be associated with the hosting account:

Click Next to continue to the Options page. Select PHP 5.x as the PHP Version and click Next again. The final page is the confirmation page, that should look something like this:

Click the “Finish” button and you will be taken to the Hosting Account Center:

Initially you will get the “Pending Setup” message under “Status”. Just wait for 5-10 minutes and then refresh the page and the status should change to “Setup”. After that, click the domain name link and you will be taken to the “Hosting Dashboard” which will look like this:

I deleted some private information from the page, but you should see some information like “Admin User Name” and “IP Address”, along with “Hostname” on this page. Everything is good to go, now we need to set up the database for WordPress.

9) Easy WordPress Install

When it comes to installing WordPress, some hosting companies like GoDaddy make it very easy to get everything going with the least amount of effort. While I will be going through a detailed installation process for those who choose a different hosting company, it is up to you to choose which route you want to go through. For most people, using an automated way to install WordPress will work best, because you will not have to go through the process of setting up a database or uploading WordPress files. So if you choose a simple install, you can skip steps #10, #11 and #12 completely.

When you are done setting up the hosting account, you will be taken to the main page of the “Hosting Control Center”. On the of the page you will see a bunch of green buttons, along with some large buttons lower on the page that say “Files”, “Domains”, “Email” and “Install Apps”. The “Install Apps” button is the only one that is black and you will see “WordPress” listed as the very first link on that page. Click the “WordPress” link, then when the next page loads, click the “INSTALL NOW!” link:

Next, you will see an End User License Agreement, which states that GoDaddy does not necessarily endorse third party products and that GoDaddy has no control over how they function. Just click “I Agree” and you will be taken to a four step wizard to install WordPress. Here is how the first Step looks like:

Just select your domain, then click “Next” on the bottom of the page. The second step is skipped, because you already have a hosting account and you do not need to set one up. Here is what you will see in Step #3:

Just give a description to your WordPress database – something like “WordPress Install” and then type a database password twice. Make sure to write down this database password – you might need it later! Once you click the yellow Next button, you will be asked to choose an install directory:

Here you will have to make a choice on whether you want your blog to reside on the main page of your domain or within a folder. For example, our blog is accessed through the domain mansurovs.com directly and you do not have to put the word “blog” at the end of the URL. If you are planning to have a separate “Portfolio” page in the future, then it is probably a good idea to put your blog under a folder like “blog”. That way, you could have something like “myphotographysite.com” reserved for your portfolio page and “myphotographysite.com/blog” just for your blog. If you are not planning to have a portfolio page, then just remove everything after the slash “/” and leave this field empty. This is an important decision to make, because it will not be easy to change the URL in the future, especially after search engines index your website. Some photographers choose to have two separate domains – one to host a portfolio and another to host a blog. If you are planning to do the same, then just leave this field blank. Click “Next” to go to the final step:

Here you need to provide WordPress username and password, along with your email and “Blog Title”. Make sure to write down the username and password – you will need these to access your WordPress admin page.

Now click “Finish” and your WordPress will be installed and ready to go!

10) Setting up MySQL Database

For those who are buying hosting through another company or want to go through the full process of installing WordPress, I am also including all manual steps that require setting up a database, downloading WordPress installation files and uploading them to your hosting account and finally getting WordPress installed and configured. If you have taken the shortcut by doing the #8 above, then skip this step, along with #11 and #12.

As I have pointed out earlier, WordPress needs a database to store your blog posts and other information. The database type we will be using for WordPress is called “MySQL” and it is the most popular and the most used database on the Internet today. In order for WordPress to access the database, you will need to set it up first and create a separate username and password to access the database. Let’s go through the process of setting up your MySQL database.

While you are in the same “Hosting Dashboard” screen, click the “Set up” link under “Database” -> “MySQL: 0 of 25”. A new “Create Database” screen will show up like the following:

Type the name of your domain under “Description” and then specify the username and password to access your MySQL database. For security purposes, I highly recommend to use a long username and password with a mix of uppercase, lowercase letters and numbers. Write down the username and password you typed in these fields! Don’t worry about “Read-Only User Name” and password fields below that. Make sure to pick “5.0” as the “MySQL Version”. Set “Allow Direct Database Access” to “No”. Click OK when you are done and your database will be queued for setup. You will see another screen with “Pending Setup” prompt. Just wait for 5-10 minutes, then refresh the page by clicking the “Refresh List” button. When the MySQL database is fully setup, the status will change to “Setup”.

Now that the database is set up, we are ready to install WordPress!

On the previous page, I gave some brief history of the blogging platform, showed how to purchase a domain with a web hosting account through GoDaddy and how to create a database for WordPress. Now I will go through the WordPress installation and configuration process for your future photography blog. Let’s get going.

11) Upload WordPress Installation

Now that we have a MySQL database, we can proceed with the process of download WordPress installation files and then uploading them to your hosting account. To download WordPress, open up your browser and go to http://wordpress.org and then click the blue button that says “Download WordPress”. You will be taken to a separate download page that looks like this:

You are given two options to download WordPress – in zip (archive) or tar formats. Just click the blue download button and your browser will start downloading the zip version of WordPress.

Once the file is downloaded, open it up on your computer and extract the files to a local folder. If you have a newer version of Windows or MacOS, the operating systems come with an archiving tool that can be used to extract all files from the zip file. If you are using an older version of Windows such as Windows XP or an older version of MacOS, you will need an archiving program like Zipeg to extract the files.

Our next task is to upload all of the files that you have previously extracted to a folder on your computer to your hosting account. There are several ways to upload files to your hosting account. You can either use a built-in file manager within WordPress, or you can use an FTP client. The file manager works great and you can use it to upload files from your computer to GoDaddy. The only problem, is that the file manager is not really designed to upload files within folders, which is a problem, because WordPress has many levels of folders and files within those folders. Therefore, the only other choice is to use an FTP client – a program that is designed to upload files from a computer to a remote server and download files from a remote server to a computer. If you have already used an FTP client to upload files before, then just use the login and password you generated when you configured your hosting account in Step #8 and use your domain name as the FTP server to connect to. If you have never used FTP, then read along.

If you have closed out of your browser, go ahead and login to your GoDaddy.com account again. From the main page, go to “My Account” (black menu on the top right side of the page), then under “Products” click the “Web Hosting” link, which will bring up your hosting account. Click on the green “Launch” to open up the “Hosting Control Center”. On top of the page you will see a bunch of green menu items. Go to “Content” and pick “FTP Client”. When the page loads, you will see a short “Did you know” message, along with a Java version of the GoDaddy FTP client. If you only see a message and nothing else comes out, it means that either you do not have Java installed (which you can install by visiting this page), or your browser is incompatible. I tried this both on Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6 and it worked great. Here is how the FTP client will look like:

The left side of the page is the “Local System”, which is your computer, while the right side is the “Remote System”, which is your hosting account. You do not even need to provide a username and password or the server to connect to for this client – you will already be logged into your account. Do not pay attention to what it says on the right side under “Remote System” – there will be some standard files and directories there that you should not delete. As I have mentioned in #9 from part 1, I recommend placing your WordPress blog to a subfolder within your domain, so that you could place your portfolio page on the main domain instead. A good subfolder name is “blog”, which will make the URL of your blog something like “myphotographysite.com/blog” instead of just “myphotographysite.com”. If you are not planning to have a separate portfolio page in the future, then don’t bother with a subfolder and put everything on the main folder structure. If you do want your blog in a subfolder, go ahead and create a new folder by clicking the very first icon on the bottom of the “Remote System” side that looks like a yellow folder with a yellow circle on top. You will be prompted for a folder name – type “blog” and click OK. The right side will refresh and you will see a folder called “blog”. Double click that folder to get into it.

Now it is time to upload the WordPress installation files into that folder. Under “Local System”, locate the folder where you unzipped all WordPress files. Once you get to the extracted files, you should see folders like “wp-admin”, “wp-content” and “wp-includes” with a bunch of other files. Select all of the files on the left side of the screen (pressing CTRL+A will do the job), then click the right arrow in the middle to start transferring the files to the blog folder you created earlier. The upload process will take a while and once it is complete, the “Remote System” side will get refreshed and all files and folders you uploaded will show up there. Just make sure that you see the same files and folders on both sides (if you upload to the main folder, you will see some extra files and folders). The upload process is now complete! Now we are ready to install and configure WordPress.

12) Install WordPress

Remember how I told you earlier that WordPress is super easy to install? You will see what I meant in this step of the process. Go ahead and open a new browser window, then type the name of your domain, followed by the folder name you created in #11 above – something like “myphotographysite.com/blog” and press Enter. You should see the following error:

Don’t be scared – this is a good sign. It means that the files you uploaded in step #11 were put in the correct place. Go ahead and click the “Create a Configuration File” button. The next screen is called “WordPress Setup Configuration File”, from which you will be able to create the initial configuration of WordPress. The page warns that you need some information like database name, username, password, host and table prefix before proceeding – just click “Let’s go!” to move forward. The next page will ask you for the database connection details:

While we already have the database name (same as your database username), username and password for the database (which we created in step #10), we still need some important information like database name and host from GoDaddy. Go back to your “Hosting Control Center”, then from the top green menu, navigate to “Databases”->”MySQL”. You will be taken to a database page, where the database you created earlier will be listed. You will see two icons under “Action” – one that looks like a pen (Edit/View Details) and one that looks like a cross (Delete Database). Go ahead and click on the one that looks like a pen to Edit the database information. We won’t be editing anything – we just need to get some data from this page:

Copy the field “Host Name” and paste it into the field “Database Host” on WordPress setup page. Next, copy the “Database Name” field and paste it into the first field also called “Database Name” on WordPress setup page. The username should be the same as your database name, so type it again and then also type the password into the “Password” field. Leave “Table Prefix” as “wp_” and then click “Submit”:

If everything went well, you will be presented with the following screen that gives you the option to run the install:

If you do not see this page and you get an error, it means that the information you typed in the previous page is wrong. Go back and make sure that everything you have typed/copy-pasted is correct and click “Submit” again. Next, click the “Run the install” button. The last page will request some very basic information from you such as the administrator username and password, your email address and the title of your blog. Fill out the page with your information as shown below:

Finally, click “Install WordPress” to get the initial configuration in place. Once you do that, you will be presented with a “Success!” page, which will show you your username once again, with a link to log into the administration page. Click the “Log In” button and then type the same username and password combination you have chosen earlier and then click the blue “Log In” button once again. Now you will be taken to the WordPress Administration page that looks like this:

Whohoo! We are all set with WordPress installation and the initial configuration has also been done for us! As you can see, there is plenty of stuff on this admin page and WordPress is giving us some initial content to start with. The next step is to get some of the main settings changed to suit our photography needs…

13) Changing Initial WordPress Settings

As you can see from above, WordPress automatically provides some very basic site content for us. On top of that, the “default” configuration has also been written into your database. While most of the default settings are good enough to get started, there are some things that I prefer to change right away. Let’s go through those settings really quick. While in WordPress dashboard, go ahead and navigate to “Settings” on the left bottom side of the page. The Settings menu will expand and the “General Settings” page will come up next. Start with the “Tagline”, which is a short description of your blog. Something like “Your Name Photography” should work fine here. Do not touch “WordPress address” and “Site address” fields and leave “Membership” unchecked, with “New User Default Role” set to “Subscriber”. Next, change your timezone so that your posts are published with the correct date and time. I live in Colorado and our timezone is “UTC -7”. Look up what your UTC offset value is pick the right one from the dropdown. Don’t change the rest of the information – default values should work just fine:

At this point, there is no need to change anything under “Writing”, “Reading”, “Discussion” and “Media” Settings pages – we can change those later. Let’s go over the two most important Settings pages now – “Privacy” and “Permalinks”. When you installed WordPress, the setup page asked you if you wanted your website to be visible to search engines. You obviously do want to be visible on search engines, so visit the “Privacy” page under settings and make sure that you have the first option selected. If it is set to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”, search engines will never crawl your blog and you will never appear on search engine results. Therefore, you need to carefully choose the right option here. There are very few cases when people actually want their blogs to never appear on search engines. Unless you know what you are doing, you should just keep the first option selected.

The last configuration setting is called “Permalinks” and you also have to be very careful with this setting. Basically, a permalink is how URLs on your site show up to your visitors and search engines. The default permalink is “/?p=123”, which will use the post identification number at the end of the URL. For example, if you post an article, it will show up as something like “myphotographyblog.com/?p=555” and that number at the end will keep on incrementing every time you post something new. You also have some other choices to manage links on your blog – another popular one is “Day and name”, where current year, month and day of the month will be added to the URL, along with the name of the article at the end. For example, a “Hello World” entry posted on 01/01/2011 will show up as “myphotographyblog.com/2011/01/01/hello-world”. I am personally not a big fan of such long URLs and I certainly do not like having year/month/day data in my links. I prefer to keep it simple, by keeping just the name of the post and nothing else. For example, if I have a “Hello World” blog entry, I like it to just say “myphotographyblog.com/hello-world” without anything in between. If my blog was in “myphotographyblog.com/blog”, then the URL should be “myphotographyblog.com/blog/hello-world”. Unfortunately, WordPress does not give us an option to do that by default, so the only choice is to use a “Custom Structure”. To do this, we just need to select “Custom Structure” with “/%postname%” in the field as shown below:

Go ahead and click the blue “Save Changes” button on the bottom of the page to write the changes to Permalink Settings.

Let’s do a quick test to see if the above works. On the very top of the page, click the large text link with the name of your blog, which will take you to the current version of your blog:

This is how a default WordPress installation looks like. Don’t worry, we will change all of this very soon. At this point, we just need to make sure that the links have been updated just to have the name of the post at the end of the URL. Click on the first “Hello world!” article and take a look at the link on your browser – it should say something like “myphotographyblog.com/hello-world”, which means that the new permalinks structure is now working. A quick note to advanced WordPress users: I know that having such simple permalink structure is not good for performance and other reasons, however, I like my URLs to stay simple and meaningful while being search engine friendly.

That’s it! WordPress is now installed and the basic configuration is done. Let’s move on to some site customization and plugins.

On the previous page, I showed how to get WordPress installed and configured with the most basic settings. Now I will go through some basics of using WordPress and how you can get the initial structure of your blog going, then I will jump into plugins that enhance WordPress functionality. Let’s get going.

14) Building the initial site structure

As of now, you have a very basic WordPress blog without any content in it. Before you start playing with plugins and themes, it is a good idea to first create some site content like pages, links and posts. Go ahead and login to your WordPress dashboard by typing your blog + “/wp-admin” in your browser, for example “http://myphotographysite.com/wp-admin”. Within the dashboard, you will see a bunch of links on the left side of the page that look like this:

By clicking the above links, you can get to different parts of WordPress and control the content and the way it is displayed on your blog. The part we will focus on at the moment is between the two horizontal lines: Posts, Media, Links, Pages and Comments. These are directly responsible for the site content and you will certainly be using them a lot in the future. Here is a short summary of each link:

1. Posts – think of posts as articles or blog entries. The majority of your blog content will be made of posts. Once you click on “Posts”, the menu will expand with some sub-menu items that are related to posts. “Add New” is for adding new posts to your blog. “Categories” are used for categorizing your posts and can be nested. For example, you can have a master category called “Portraits” and then have sub-categories like “Children”, “Adults” and “Corporate”. “Post Tags” allow you to create and maintain different tags that can be used for your posts. For example, if you have portraits of children you want to share and you are creating a post about it, you would use the “Portraits” and “Children” categories. Now let’s say those children belong to a local elementary school, say “XYZ Elementary”. If you take pictures of more children from the same school, and you want parents of those children to be able to find and see pictures of all kids from the same school on your blog, then you can use a “XYZ Elementary” tag for each of those blog posts. Then, parents could just click on the “XYZ Elementary” tag on your post and find other pictures from the same school. Why not use categories for this? Because if you happen to photograph kids from another school, then you would have to create another category, adding more stuff to your list of categories. In a few months, you might find yourself with too many categories on your site and a really bad browsing experience for your site visitors. Think of categories and tags like this – categories are for major site sections, so that your visitors could find content they are looking for fast, while tags are for grouping related posts together. In our site, for example, I have some main categories like Photography Techniques and Cameras and Lenses. If I am posting an article on a camera, I obviously select the “Cameras and Lenses” category. But because cameras and lenses are made by different manufacturers and have all kinds of sub-groups within them, instead of creating a bunch of child categories like “DSLR Cameras” and possibly “Nikon” underneath that, I will simply use tags like “DSLR Camera” and “Nikon” to describe it. That way, I do not have to create an infinite number of categories and sub-categories (which is not good for search engines anyway). If a person wants to look at all Camera and Lens articles, they click on the category. If they want to find all posts related to Nikon, they click the Nikon tag. There is rarely a reason to create nested structures – remember, you should make it as easy as possible for your readers to find your content. Do not overwhelm them with too many places to click on. Some people abuse their site tags, putting all kinds of keywords that might not even be related to the post. Don’t do that – you will certainly spoil the browsing experience of your readers.
2. Media – this section consists of “Library” and “Add New“. The Media Library is used to manage photographs, videos and other media you post on your blog directly, while Add New is for adding media directly. I highly recommend not to touch the Media Library and Add New, because you can upload and manage media uploads from posts and pages directly. I personally only come to Media Library when I need to mass-delete some photographs that I am not using in my posts anymore.
3. Links – they are used for linking to internal pages or external websites. For example, if you need to create a link to your friend’s blog, you can create it here and then make it show up on your main site. Use “Links” to manage new and existing links, “Add New” to add new links and “Link Categories” for categorizing your links, similar to categorizing your posts. For example, you could have a link category called “Friends” where you link to your friends’ pages, and you could have a separate category called “Photographers”, where you could link to some well-known photographers.
4. Pages – unlike posts, pages represent content that rarely changes and always stays on top of your primary page navigation. For example, you would want your “Contact Us” and “Portfolio” pages to be on the top at all times, so that your site visitors can easily view your portfolio and contact you for your services. The post area always get refreshed with the latest content you publish, while the page area stays the same in a designated area. Use the “Pages” link to manage new and existing pages and “Add New” to add a new page.
5. Comments – the comments section does not have any sub-menu items and is used for managing comments and “pings”. Comments are left by people on your blog posts and pages, while pings are links to your blog posts from other blogs. From the Comments area, you can filter through comments, approve, edit, reply, delete and mark them as “spam”. It is the central place that shows all comments and pings left on your blog posts.

Start out by creating a couple of pages. First, delete the “Sample Page” that WordPress automatically created for you when you installed it, then create pages like “About Us”, “Contact Us” and “Portfolio”. Go to “Posts”, click “Add New”, then type the name of the page, along with some content as shown below:

Click the blue “Publish” button and your page will be saved. Once you create 2-3 different pages, open the link on the very top of the admin page in a new browser window and you will see how your site looks with the new pages:

Note the red area – the pages I created are immediately visible on the blog! That was pretty easy, wasn’t it? If you click on those page links, you will be taken to those pages, which will show whatever you typed when you created those pages.

Next, let’s work on some sample posts or “blog entries”. But before we start publishing posts, let’s first create a couple of categories, so that we can properly categorize those posts. In your WordPress administration area, expand “Posts”, then click on “Categories”. Under “Add New Category”, create a master category like “Photography” and then sub-categories like “Wildlife”, “Landscapes” and “Macro”, similar to the below:

The “Name” is how the category text will appear. “Slug” is used for the link of the category (just use the lower-case version of the text and replace spaces with dashes). “Parent” will define if the category you are creating will be created in the root level, or will be under another category. “Description” is an optional field to describe your category. Once you add a category, it will immediately show up on the right side, with a proper structure.

Now that the categories are added, let’s go ahead and add a couple of posts. Click on “Posts” and you will be taken to the post management area. There will be a “Hello world!” entry that is automatically created by WordPress. Go ahead and delete it, then create some sample posts. Click the “Add New” link, type the post title and then some main text in the middle. It might be a good idea to just copy-paste a couple of paragraphs of text from another website for now – I will copy some text from another article on my blog:

Try to experiment with some formatting options, like making your text bold, italic, etc – use the buttons in “Visual” editor to play with the text. Eventually, you will have to learn how to use these well. Also, try inserting an image or two from your computer by clicking the first icon to the right of “Upload/Insert”. Under “Categories” tab, select a couple of categories and choose different ones for each post you create. Also, don’t forget to add a couple of tags under “Post Tags” as shown above.

After creating a couple of posts, let’s once again check out the main page and see how it looks now:

Things are starting to shape up now! As you can see, the categories are also showing up on the right hand side now. By the way, don’t worry if all categories are not showing up – only the ones that you use in posts will be visible.

If you scroll to the end of the first blog post, you will see something like “Posted In”, with links to the categories you have picked for that post, along with “Tagged”, displaying the tags you used for the post – that’s how most of your visitors will be finding related content.

15) Working on site navigation with widgets

All right, so far things are looking good – we have created some pages and posts and the blog is starting to look better with some added content. If you look at the front page of your site, you might be wondering how you can customize the look of the site navigation on the right hand side. Right now, you should be seeing the “Search” area, “Recent Posts”, “Recent Comments”, “Archives”, “Categories” and “Meta” – the default navigation links. What if you do not want to see “Recent Posts” or you want to move your Categories above everything else? That’s where WordPress widgets come in handy!

Remember, WordPress is a very flexible blogging platform and content management system. You can customize it pretty much any way you like and some themes allow you to take customization to the next level, with all kinds of extra addons and widgets. WordPress is shipped with some cool widgets that you can use to manage the site layout and you can download even more widgets to do other things. Basically, widgets are customizable mini-applications that can be used dynamically in different parts of your blog. For example, the Categories you see on your main page are displayed through a “Categories” widget, which can be customized to show categories as dropdowns with or without hierarchy. Let’s start with adding some widgets and creating a better site navigation for the blog.

In your administration panel expand “Appearance”, then click on “Widgets”. You should see something like this:

Pay attention to the “Primary Widget Area” on the right side of the screen – you will see “Search”, “Recent Posts”, “Recent Comments”, “Archives”, “Categories” and “Meta” widgets – similar to what you saw on the main page of your site. This is the place where we can change the site navigation. The coolest thing about the widgets page, is that the interface is “drag-and-drop” enabled, which means that all you have to do is drag a widget from the “Available Widgets” to the right side and it will be added. Removing a widget is also very easy – just drag a widget away from the right side and it will be removed. Let’s get rid of some widgets like “Recent Posts”, “Recent Comments”, “Archives” and “Meta” – I only want to leave “Search” and “Categories” for now. Once you do that, click the down arrow on the right side of “Categories” to open up options for this widget. Go ahead and put a check mark in front of “Show post counts” and “Show hierarchy”, then click “Save”:

Now open up the main page once again, reload the page with your browser and see how it looks now:

Look at that – the site navigation on the right side is now cleaned up and we don’t see anything but Search and Categories. Let’s test adding a widget to the right navigation. From the Widgets page, drag and drop a widget called “Calendar” and put it under “Categories”. Once you do that, the main page will have a calendar right under Categories.

This is basically how widgets work. Definitely spend some time experimenting with widgets and see which ones you want to you on your website. Let’s move to plugins now!

16) Expanding the functionality of WordPress through plugins

The true power of WordPress is unveiled with its modular plugin system. So far, I have only shown you the most basic functionality of WordPress that comes with the install. With various plugins, you can expand WordPress functionality and do a lot of cool stuff, like adding social media integration (Facebook, Twitter, etc), spam filtering and regularly backing up your WordPress database. WordPress ships with two plugins called “Akismet” and “Hello Dolly” and you can download and install as many plugins as you want. The “Akismet” plugin is a very useful plugin that will help you with comment spam, while “Hello Dolly” is basically a demonstration plugin that you can get rid of. With your WordPress installation, you can easily download and install other plugins directly from the “Plugins” page located in WordPress administration area.

The plugins that I will be showing you are the ones that I personally use for my blog. I encourage you to look at other plugins as well, because you might find other plugins that do the same thing better. In fact, if you do find a better plugin, please let me know so that I can update my list. Below is a list of plugins I recommend, sorted by categories:

Comments

1. Akismet – as I have pointed out above, Akismet is the standard plugin that is shipped with WordPress. I highly recommend to use it, because it will help you to keep your comments clean. It won’t prevent comment spam, but does a pretty good job filtering and tagging spam. Definitely my first plugin to install.
2. NoSpamNX – another great layer of protection against automated spam bots.
3. Comment Reply Notification – a great plugin that will automatically send emails to your visitors they leave comments on your blog.
4. Subscribe To Comments – will give your users ability to subscribe to an article, so that whenever there is a new comment posted, the subscriber will receive an email with a notification.

Posts

1. After The Deadline – a cool plugin that checks your grammar and scans text against spelling errors inside the editor.
2. Category Order – by default, WordPress orders categories alphabetically. This plugin will let you sort your categories in any way you want.
3. Contact Form 7 – a very simple and yet highly customizable contact form plugin for your “Contact Us” page.
4. WordPress Popular Posts – if you want to display the most popular posts on your blog, this plugin is a great choice. I use it not only for displaying popular posts, but also for viewing how many people visited a particular article on my blog.
5. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – will display related posts under each article.

Social Media

1. Sociable – a social media plugin that lets visitors share your links via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many other websites.
2. TweetMeme Button – when your posts get re-tweeted, you will see the total number of re-tweets on your posts.
3. Twitter Tools – gives you the ability to integrate WordPress with Twitter. Can auto-post messages in Twitter when new posts are created, as well as posting your Twitter messages back on your blog.

Performance & Search Engine Optimization

1. All in One SEO Pack – the best Search Engine Optimization tool for WordPress.
2. Broken Link Checker – a very useful tool that automatically scans all your posts and comments to see if any of the links are bad. Gives you the option to quickly change links or easily unlink bad URLs.
3. Google Analyticator – a great way to track your visitor statistics through Google Analytics.
4. Google XML Sitemaps – will create a sitemap of your site for better search engine crawling. I highly recommend using Google Webmaster Tools for your blog.
5. JetPack – a simple, yet great tool to view some statistical information about your site visitors without leaving WordPress.

Backups and Security

1. Login LockDown – if somebody is trying to hack into your WordPress administration area, the Login LockDown plugin will lock out your user ID for a specified amount of time. A very useful plugin to prevent brute-force attacks.
2. WP-DBManager – the best tool to administer your WordPress database. You can set up a backup schedule and your WordPress database will be backed up (with an option to be emailed to you) on a periodic basis.

Gallery and Image Viewers

1. Faster Image Insert – when you start uploading multiple photographs for your posts, you will realize that the built-in functionality for inserting images is quite limited. The Faster Image Insert plugin will let you insert multiple uploaded images at once, which will save plenty of time on posts with more than a few images.
2. Simple Lightbox – by default, WordPress opens large versions of files in a new page. Simple Lightbox will load images on the fly and will let your visitors view posted photographs in the same window as your post. You can set up all kinds of backgrounds for your Lightbox to match your WordPress theme.
3. NextGEN Gallery – one of the most popular Gallery plugins for WordPress. Great for showing off your portfolio!

17) Installing Plugins

The easiest way to install WordPress plugins, is to use the “Add New” link under “Plugins” in your WordPress administration area. Many of the plugins above are quite popular, so you can quickly get to them by clicking the “Popular” link in the same page. Once a plugin comes up, simply click on the “Install Now” link to install that plugin. For all other plugins that are not in the “Popular” list, just type the name of the plugin from the above list in the “Search” field and then click the “Search Plugins” button as shown below:

The search results are normally pretty accurate and as I have pointed out above, all you need to do is click “Install Now” once you find the plugin you were looking for. After a plugin is installed, you need to activate it, because it will be disabled by default, even after it is downloaded and installed. You will be able to then see the status of the plugin by visiting the “Plugins” page in WordPress.

One thing I am not going to do in this article is go over the configuration of each plugin, since it would just take me forever. While most of the plugins are very easy to get going with a simple “Activation” link, some plugins, especially the ones that integrate with social media will require plenty of configuration. The good news, is that you can get most of the information from provided help and screenshots. The bad news, is that if you cannot get it to work, you will probably have to ask for some help from other people or the author of the plugin. But before you do that, definitely check out the plugin page first and read the Installation notes from the plugin author. Don’t be scared of the plugin installation and configuration process – most plugins are very easy to get going.

Definitely spend some time playing with various plugins and explore other plugins that are available on wordpress.org. You might find some cool plugins that I have not listed above that you would want to use on your blog.

On the previous page, I went through some basics of using WordPress and how to get the initial site structure going, along with using WordPress plugins. In this final part, I will show you how to use themes to manage the look of your WordPress blog.

18) WordPress Themes

Now that you have WordPress installed and configured, it is time to make your blog presentable by utilizing a theme. The true power of WordPress lies in its ability to use highly-customizable themes that can be tuned to your needs and taste. Thousands of free themes are readily available for you to download and use and you can install them directly from WordPress. However, free themes are rarely good and the ones that are good are used by many bloggers. If you want to have a more or less unique feel to your blog, your best bet is to get a commercial theme. Let’s go over the process of installing free themes first.

19) Installing Free WordPress Themes

Let’s navigate to the currently installed WordPress themes through “Appearance” -> “Themes”. Here is how the screen should look like on a default WordPress install:

WordPress ships with a default theme called “Twenty Ten”, which is a very simple theme that incorporates many of the new features introduced in WordPress version 3. But why use the default theme when you can use a cool theme for free? Let’s install a couple of free themes and try them out. Click the “Install Themes” tab on the top of the page, then either do a search or check out some of the featured plugins on the “Featured” page:

All you have to do is click the “Install” link under the theme you like and it will be automatically downloaded and installed into your themes folder, as shown below:

From here, you can Preview the downloaded theme (as in the previous page) or Activate it. Let’s go ahead and activate the installed theme:

Remember, each theme contains various customizations that might or might not support the latest features of WordPress. Most WordPress themes are widget-friendly and let you customize such things as blog header, background, etc. Simplified themes do not provide the ability to customize themes and you have to manually edit them (PHP/HTML/CSS programming knowledge often required). If you downloaded a theme you like and it is not built to allow customizations, you might need to move on to the next theme that does. Here is how the blog looks like now that I have it active:

20) Customizing WordPress Themes

You will find that some themes work great out of the box, while others require some customization to make them look good. If the theme you installed cannot be customized through a friendly web interface, your only option (besides finding another theme) is to manually edit theme/template files. You can do this through the WordPress Theme Editor, located under “Appearance”->”Editor”. Here is how it looks like:

If you have never done any kind of web design or programming before, you might get lost here, since you will see a bunch of code. However, if you are careful enough, you might be able to make light modifications to color and fonts in your theme by just reading the notes on the default style.css file. The files that you can modify through the web interface are located on the right panel under “Templates” and you can open them by clicking on them, but I would not recommend to open any of the .php files, because if you mess any of them up, your WordPress might stop working. As you can see from the above screenshot, the author of the template provides specific instructions on how to create additional styles instead of making modifications to the default style.

If you want to make significant changes to a theme, such as changing the main look, adjusting page width, backgrounds, etc., you might need to consult with someone who knows web programming languages. But don’t just pay someone to customize an existing theme. Since free themes are rarely good, you will be better off to either buy a commercial theme, or pay a design company to create a customized theme for your blog. The latter is not cheap and can cost you several thousand dollars+, so if you are not ready to spend that kind of money, your best bet is to get a commercial theme for under $200-300. Let’s talk about commercial themes now.

21) Commercial WordPress Themes

Just like free WordPress themes, there are many types and kinds of commercial themes that range anywhere from several dollars to a couple of hundred, depending on capabilities and appearance. I am not going to go through them all, because there are too many to list. Just search for something like “wordpress themes for photographers” in Google and you will find hundreds of links to commercial themes. In this guide, I will only talk about one commercial theme that I have personally (and successfully) used in the past and the one I know many photographers use worldwide for their WordPress blogs. It is called “Prophoto3” and it is developed by ProPhotoBlogs.com. The nice thing about this commercial theme, is that it is built specifically for photographers and is highly customizable. It comes with a bunch of free sub-themes that can be customized to your taste and it is search engine-friendly. It has an integrated gallery and slideshow capabilities and each page such as “About Me” can be easily customized directly from the admin interface. For an additional fee, you can even purchase more great-looking themes for ProPhoto3 from the Design Store if you do not like the free ones.

The ProPhoto3 theme costs $199 for a DYI (do it yourself) installation or $279 for ProPhoto folks to install it for you. If you buy it from this link, ProPhoto will give you a $10 discount. Unfortunately, you cannot just download and install it directly from your WordPress themes page like you can do with free themes.

Once you purchase the theme, you can use an FTP client to upload the provided files (make sure to unzip the archive to a local folder first) to your “wp-content/themes” folder. Make sure that all files reside in a theme folder called “prophoto3” under “wp-content/themes”, so your style.css file should be here: “wp-content/themes/prophoto3/style.css”. If you get stuck in the process, ProPhotoBlogs.com has a number of tutorials on their website that you can use to get the theme up and running.

Here is a short video of the capabilities of the ProPhoto theme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpIWKYDM6xg

22) Post-installation maintenance

Just like with any software you have installed on your computer, every once in a while you have to upgrade your WordPress installation and/or plugins that you use. This is a normal part of WordPress maintenance and I highly recommend that you regularly login to your blog dashboard to see if there is an update available. Why? Because some updates contain security fixes and if you do not upgrade your WordPress install regularly, you might have a risk of someone hacking into blog and making your life miserable. I have never had anyone hack my WordPress blog, because I always update it on time. However, there is a big crowd of people that had their blogs hacked and often ended up losing everything they had, because they did not back up their blog frequently and did not know or care about upgrading WordPress.

The good news, is that you will receive an automated notification when there is an update available, as can be seen below:

Another good news is that the process of updating WordPress is very simple – just click on the link that says “Please update now” and you will be taken to a page where you can update WordPress:

WordPress will prompt you to backup the existing database before proceeding with an upgrade. It is always a good idea to backup, especially during a system upgrade, so if you have not yet installed a backup plugin, go ahead and get one installed as outlined in Part 3 of the guide, then make a backup of your database. Once completed, click the “Update Automatically” button to launch the automated upgrade process. Right after you click the button, you will see the following screen:

The last line should say “WordPress updated successfully”, which indicates that everything went well and WordPress has been updated. If you see an error message that WordPress could not be updated, you might need to adjust permissions for WordPress files. Generally, this is done by the hosting provider, so call them or email them and they should be able to take care of it. Every once in a while, you will get a message like this:

Nothing to worry about, this just means that the WordPress update contains some tables to database structure that have to be carried out. Just click on “Update WordPress Database” and the upgrade script will run. I have never seen these fail, so you will most likely have a successful upgrade. If the upgrade fails, you still have a backup of your old database (assuming you backed up your database before the upgrade) that you can revert back to, so the risk is very small.

The process of upgrading plugins is very similar – you will get a notification in your dashboard about any plugin updates and all you have to do is click the link to update your plugins to the latest versions.

23) Backing up your blog

Speaking of backups, the above-mentioned plugin will only backup your database. Since you are running a photography blog, you will most likely be posting images directly into your blog, instead of using services like Flickr. This means that backing up your database is not enough in case you lose everything – you also must backup the uploaded files and media, at the minimum. There are multiple ways to accomplish this. You can use a separate backup plugin to back up your files, or you can use an FTP client as shown in Part 2 of the guide. The file backup plugin that I recommend is called “WP-DB-BACKUP“, which can be configured to back up your files hourly, daily or weekly. I recommend to back up your files either daily or weekly (depending on the number of images you have). When the backups are completed, the WordPress Backup plugin will let you download them to your computer. The plugin requires some post-installation work (such as setting up a backup folder and creating a permissions file), but you should be able to do it via an FTP client. If you prefer to manually copy all files, then using an FTP client is probably going to be your next best bet, although the process is going to be much slower when you have many images.

Either way, don’t forget about making a full backup of your WordPress blog. There is nothing worse than losing everything you have worked on for so long.

I hope you found these guides helpful to manage your own WordPress blog. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments section below. Good luck!