The Home Office Website: How to Customize Wordpress, Part 1

If you're not yet familiar with Wordpress, start by reading this article: Setting Up Your Home Office Website with Wordpress. That article will get you through the installation and basic set-up. Once you've gone through those steps, it's time to start customizing. There are two basic ways to customize your Wordpress website. First, you can change how it looks. It's addictive to click through page after page of the Wordpress themes available (free). The second, and probably more important, change is in how your Wordpress site works. You tweak the inner workings by adding plug-ins, and you can

find nifty little gadgets for your sidebar, your administrator interface, your ad management, posting preferences, image display, podcasting, video embedding... For just about anything you can do on a website, you can find a Wordpress plug-in.

All those options are great, but they can be very overwhelming if you're new to the system. I started out by adding a whole lot of plug-ins that sounded fun and cute, and missed out on some of the basic plug-ins that make actually managing the site much easier and more efficient. And efficiency is what we're all about in our home offices, isn't it? So I give you the list of the ten best plug-ins for Wordpress. I know you probably want to skip this part and go straight to the theme-browsing, but trust me: if you take a little time to get your basics in place, installing and customizing themes will be much more fun, and much easier. And "fun and easy" is what we're all about in our home offices, isn't it? Oh, wait... That's efficiency.

Usually, the best place to shop for your new plug-ins is at the Wordpress.org site. Go there, and click on "Extend." (It's on the top menu bar.) Then click on "Plugins." (It's on the left sidebar menu.) There are a lot of plug-ins, almost 3,000 at this time. Maybe over 3,000 by the time you get there! You can search the Wordpress.org plug-in database for the plug-ins I'll mention, below, but I've found that the searches tend to return a lot of results, and not necessarily the specific ones I want. So for the plug-ins I recommend, I'll include a direct link. For other plug-ins, browsing the Wordpress.org site is your best bet.

The normal process for installing a plug-in is this: you find the plug-in you want, download it to your computer, upload it to your server where your Wordpress website is hosted, put it in the "wp-content/plug-ins" folder in your server's file system, and then go to the admin section of your Wordpress site. Once you've logged in, you click on the "Plugins" tab, which takes you to a list of your installed plug-ins. You should see the newest one there, and you'll activate it by clicking on (surprise!) "Activate," then adjust the settings if needed.

Part 2 of this series will cover The Top Ten Plug-Ins for Wordpress, and the first one on the list will make installing all other plug-ins much simpler. It's called the One Click Plug-In Updater,

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