The WordPress 5-minute install is great, nothing complicated about getting your blog up and running (most of the time). But once you install WordPress there are a number of other steps that you need to take in order to get the most from your blog.

Here are some basic SEO tips which every web designer should follow; it is good practice to design websites using this basic SEO Standards

You started your blog, you’ve got some cool posts and people are starting to leave comments on them. And, as a good host, you’ll probably want to reply to them. But in comments, or should we say discussion, you’re just an average Joe, not an author. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could somehow highlight your comment, so everybody could know that that’s author speaking? Yes, it would be awesome, and we’re going to show you how can you do it.

Since version 2.5 of WordPress, Gravatar service is included in the core files. On one hand, you can use it to make the comment overview more nicely. But you can also integrate this function in your template and you don’t have to use a plugin.

For everyone, who changes the year in their footer manually every year, here is a little tip

If you use pages which have the state private, they will not be shown in the navigation. Nevertheless it can make sense to show this specific page in the navigation, if you want to provide easy access to this page for your users. The page should only appear to privileged users for sure. I will show you a little hack, which will let you exactly do this.

This install guide assumes you have no experience working with WordPress, dealing with FTP, PHP or MySQL. The prerequisites for this guide are pretty much none. All you need is about 5 minutes and a cup of coffee.

The default text used for the “read more” link in most themes is either ‘Read the rest of this entry »’ or ‘(more…)’ depending on whether your theme was based on the default or classic WordPress theme respectively. The problem is that the default text is neither appealing nor any good from an SEO point.

Bookmarks are those things called Links in your WordPress dashboard. We’re going to use them to create our navigation menu.

Blogrolls and long link lists have pretty much died out in the blogging world. Using them to link out to all your blogging friends isn’t as cool as it used to be.