What there isn't is a step-by-step guide to set up a WordPress blog for real estate. I'm promoting community blogging, so this series will focus on a community oriented blog, but the steps are the same if you only want to write about and feature real estate. Part 1 is getting the blog up and ready for content.
1. Why WordPress and Why a Community Real Estate Blog?
There are two schools of thought about what real estate blogging should look like. One is that you should be fully focused on real estate content, first to get the search engines to notice, and the other is that you want to target those ready to buy or sell right now.I take the other position, that a community oriented blog, with lots of area, community, business and real estate information will be a better long term business generator. In only 175 days, my site achieved good Google ranking, and I'm building a visitor base quickly due to the content. So, take this first module and see how easy it can be to build your future business on a WordPress Community Blog.
2. Hosting and Why You Need It for Your WordPress Blog
Though WordPress software is free in all cases, your blog must be hosted somewhere on the web. If you elect the free WordPress hosting option, you'll save some money, but you'll also lose a great deal of design and presentation flexibility. Use the resources in this article to see why paid hosting is best, and where to go to get an easy WordPress install.3. The WordPress Dashboard - Your Real Estate Blog Control Center
Once your blog is hosted and operational, your login point will normally always be your Dashboard. Here is your stepping off point to all of the functions you need for design, presentation, posting and more. This step-by-step tour with screen shots will familiarize you with each button destination and a quick overview of what you do there.4. The Theme for Your WordPress Blog Site
One thing you can still enjoy with a hosted WordPress installation is design flexibility and creativity options. With hundreds of excellent themes out there, you need only make some decisions about basic layout, columns, etc. Then just have fun finding the right theme for your site.In this lesson, with screen shots, you see what is important in your decision process, as well as how to access themes and evaluate them for your site.
5. WordPress Plugins - Adding Functionality & Fun to Our Site
Before your first post, your site needs to have a basic structure and design. Then we install plugins that add functions and power to our WordPress installation. Some of these plugins make posting easier, some change the way our site looks, and others give us access to images, search engine optimization functions and more.You'll be installing plugins you want in the future. In this lesson, we install some that I can't do without, and I'll tell you why.
6. WordPress Dashboard Settings - How Our Site Will Operate
Now that we've installed our plugins, we move to the Settings area off the Dashboard. Here we have a set of default preferences for how many areas of our site will function. Some plugins also allow you to configure them to meet your needs.We'll go through the Settings area here. I'll make some settings suggestions, but it's ultimately up to you how your site functions. For now though, you might want to do them as I suggest until you see them in action.
7. Categories in WordPress - Setting Ours Up
If you follow the community real estate blogging track effectively, you'll rapidly have hundreds of posts in your blog. It is very important that we set up Categories to group them by like subject matter. This isn't just for us, as it's also important to your visitors to be able to locate posts on the topics of their choice.We'll also be doing some static pages that actually load a category of posts. It's a great way to create pages that automatically populate with loads of useful articles on the subject of the page.
8. The Pages on Your Site - A Primer
A blog site is very different from a static type website. The large numbers of articles (or posts) that you'll be placing on the site, will arrange themselves by categories. However, there are certain pages that you'll want to be the same information all the time. Those include the IDX search pages, About and Contact pages, and others.This section introduces you to pages, their use, and how they're accessed in most WordPress themes.
9. Plugins and Widgets for Your Blog Sidebar Content
We're almost ready for actual content-building. The last step in learning what we'll need to build and display our content is to learn how widgets (a fancy plugin) are used to change and customize the content in our left and right sidebars. You'll learn every step of installing, activating and displaying fun and useful widget content.10. WordPress Real Estate Blog Page Stucture and Plan
In this lesson we look at how many main pages and child pages we want for our site. We want to plan for a manageable number of page tabs, while making it easy and fast for our site visitors to navigate through the site.We look at how to use the "redirection" plugin to point a page to a category page, rather than building a page. This is how we'll display a great deal of material.
