[dropcap style=”dropcap2″] I [/dropcap]  have been diving more and more into WordPress over the last couple of months. While working on friends sites like Stirling Bootcamp I have been very surprised how easy it is to develop against. Having started at the point of hacking existing themes to developing my own it’s just so easy to get an idea up and running quite quickly.  Before going down the hack/develop my own theme there are many things you should think about before you hit that install button.

1 : Stop, Think, Action, Don’t just hit install

Don’t user the “admin” username for your administrator. I posted about the plugins i use and one of them is “Limit login attempts”. This is an extract from the log of this plugin:

IP Tried to log in as
78.178.189.113 admin (2 lockouts)
109.236.81.43 admin (1 lockout)
109.236.81.223 admin (1 lockout)
88.243.137.180 admin (1 lockout)
121.204.24.75 siphilp (1 lockout)
88.243.64.211 admin (1 lockout)

Over the last couple of months “admin” has been top of this list with siphilp being a close second. When installing be creative, end of the day you control the public name via the user profile.

2 : Let WordPress lead the way

We all want an easy life but passwords these days need to be secure.  Let WordPress do it’s job. Yes, you can change your password but I recommend you don’t. Gibberish and random is good. If you need inspiration for a password head over to http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

3 : Plugins

I’m not going to re-invent a previous post so head over to my default plugins post for a list of what I use.

4:What you don’t know won’t hurt you (limit plugins)

At this time of writing over on the WordPress site there were 19,683 plugins. That’s alot of plugins. The more you install the more a possibility you start slowing down your site.  Before hitting the install button think about if you really need it. Jetpack has alot of extra goodies, unfortunately the social service side could be better. If you need to install a plugin for whatever reason make sure you check your site is still loading in a quick and stable manner and also check (if using caching plugin) that nothing breaks.

Another option which leads on to the next point is that you could find a theme that has the functionality your require built in keeping away from installing addition plugins.

5: Theme for you

This is I think the hardest part. If you don’t want to part with cash there are 1000’s of free themes out there and picking 1 isn’t always easy.  Some of the free themes come with a vast range of built in features. Think about what you want your theme to protray, colours, interaction, social setup (easy to add my twitter account) etc.  If you can’t find a free theme that you like then the next option is to part with some of that hard earned cash of yours.  There are many premium WordPress theme sites out there, I would recommend Theme Forest as I have bought a couple of themes hassle free with fantastic support.

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