wp-toolbox

Generally speaking there's a little bit of prep work you need to do before starting a WordPress theme. It's hard to try developing a theme when you're constantly downloading and uploading files to confirm how well they're working and it's even harder to maintain a blog when you're constantly changing the live theme.

To get around this it makes sense to setup a sandbox where you can play around with theme design all you want without worrying about breaking your live theme. While you always have the option of creating a secret directory on your current hosting account it's much easier to install WordPress locally and then play around with the files on your own machine. This prevents you from constantly uploading and downloading files and lets you achieve a safe working environment that doesn't hurt your live blog.

WAMPServer is pretty much widely recognized as the best software to use when installing WordPress locally on a windows machine (XP OR Vista) - it's also free and easy to use which is a big plus.

Rather than spend a long time outlining how exactly to install and setup WAMPServer I'll default to an excellent post that was written over at Weblog Tools Collection.

This two part post will help you get WordPress up and running locally in a matter of just a few minutes - the longest part is the download itself!

• In part one you'll download the software and get WAMPServer running locally in Windows (this method works in XP and Vista)
• In part two you'll get WordPress running in Windows and learn how to migrate your public blog to your local machine

While the second part of the second part is helpful I think in the long run you're better starting a fresh blog locally for the purposes of theme design. Over the course of this project we'll be creating special posts that showcase different HTML, CSS and JavaScript related posts to make sure things are running well so you might as well have a blank slate to work off of.

Either way it's really up to you.

Angela Booth of BloggingTips had an interesting suggestion as part of her article "Five Blogging New Year’s Resolutions to Make 2008 Great." As her 4th suggested resolution she recommends making your blog the center of your social network:

Have you discovered social networking? It’s time to find out what Web 2.0 is all about, and how you can build your traffic by joining social networks and becoming active on them.

I know a lot of sites generate some fast early traffic using MySpace. A friend of mine actually used a MySpace account to advertise a Wiki he was putting together and managed to get some pretty incredible traffic in the first few days.

Beside's advertising your blog through social networks though you can also turn the idea around and advertise some of your social networking profiles the same way using your blogroll. Consider putting links to your Flickr albums, Facebook or MySpace pages to help personalize the experience of visiting your blog.

Here are some other quick tips for your Blogroll:

1. Using an affiliate link (like those from Amazon Associates) you can link to recommended products and yield a little extra income.
2. Link to some other new blogs in your niche - newer blogs are a bit more likely to notice the traffic and maybe share the link-love.
3. Create a network with your other blogs. Linking to your other blogs is a good way to increase traffic across them all and maybe convert some of your existing readers.

In this post we'll run through the absolute basics of installing WordPress on a GoDaddy hosting account. If you have any questions feel free to include them in the comments section.

In order to do this you'll just need to have access to an existing Domain Name and Hosting Account as well as the most recent version of WordPress. To get started we're going to create a database for WordPress to use, then we'll upload all the appropriate files and finally we'll make the tweaks necessary to get your blog running.

Besides your Domain Name and Hosting Account I'd also recommend picking a text editor because we will need to make some slight changes to one file. While you can certainly use NotePad I recommend taking the time to grab NotePad++ an open source NotePad replacement that is an absolutely essential part of my WordPress Toolbox.