Playing With A New Installation Of WordPress
In addition to powering this blog, I use WordPress to run a number of niche websites I have created as well. These are mostly focused on attracting targeted readers with a collection of topical articles and then generating revenue with a combination of Adsense ads and affiliate promotional products. Over time, as the website matures and the domain starts to grow in traffic and page rank, I determine whether to sell it off or develop it further.
There are a lot of excellent reasons for using WordPress as my publishing platform. It is easy to manage, open source (so I can transfer ownership of the site without licensing issues), there are a ton of very valuable plugins to optimize the sites, and I can crank out professional sites in no time.
Part of the reason I can develop a site so quickly is that I create a ‘customized’ installation package on my local computer. This package includes all of the plugins that I typically install along with my preferred template (the Semilogic template system is amazingly versatile) and any code tweaks I’m using. When the time comes to create a new site, I simply upload the contents of my installation folder, link it up to a new database, and then switch on all the plugins and start tweaking the site.
I could speed this process up a little further if I also built a full online installation from the package and then saved a copy of the database (which would preserve all of my standard settings for the live installation too!) I could just install this to the database when I created it. Then, I would only need to modify the database settings in the configuration file and update the blog’s domain name, etc. once everything was installed.
On Saturday of this past weekend, I installed and customized 3 new sites (www.AuthorityMembershipSites.com and www.e-BookMarketingSecrets.com – the 3rd doesn’t have any content yet and I don’t want to post a link to it and have Google spider it before it is ready!) I uploaded several weeks worth of content updates on each using the ‘post in the future’ option in WordPress. It will be a week or so before most of the content goes live (this is to give the search engines a steady supply of new content so that they check in regularly for updates.)
Creating sites in this fashion is ideal. I can move from idea to finished site with amazing speed. Once the domain is registered, I copy the installation to the server and start working on content. By the time the domain registration is complete, I have the basics in place and can have a really nice site live for the world to see.
Do you have any tips or tricks for speeding up your WordPress installations? If so, leave a comment.
If you want to hire my to install a site for you from my custom package, click on the contact form and send me a message. I charge $65 for the basic installation and $65/hr for any additional customization – but my availability is limited to a few installations per week (I’ve got to keep my own sites going too!)
The Go-To Guy!
