WordPress Site – Initial Content Checklist
After completing your WordPress installation, you will need to configure some basic settings and add some important information before making your site “live”. Content is key for attracting and impressing visitors on the web. Use the following checklist to gather and source quality content for your site.
1) Written Site Content
- Business name and brief description of your business.
- “About Us” content
- “Products and Services” content
- Site Categories For Your main service/product categories (ideal range is 3 – 20 categories)
- 500 – 800 words about your business, products and services or site purpose for the home page.
- 5 – 10 images for products. Image format = .jpg, .png or .gif.
- Contact Details (business address, email, telephone numbers)
- 1 – 3 initial articles or blog posts to be added to your site. (saved in Word document or plain text file).
- List of URLs for all the links you want to include in your site (check that all URLs are working correctly)
2) WordPress Theme (Site Design)
- Select a WordPress Theme for your site.
Free WordPress Themes:
http://www.wordpress.org/extend/themes
Premium WordPress Themes:
- ThemeForest: http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/themes/themeforest
- WooThemes: http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/themes/woothemes
- StudioPress: http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/themes/studiopress
- SoloStream: http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/themes/solostream
- StoreFront: http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/themes/storefront
3) Artwork
You will need to create all artwork for your site (e.g. logos, banners, graphic buttons, newsletter report covers, etc.) and have these ready to be uploaded to your server.
Ensure that your artwork meets all the correct specifications of your theme:
- Image format = .jpg, .png or .gif.
- Image Size: Check the folowing …
- Content area width (you don’t want your images to be wider than the page).
- Header image height and width
- Thumbnail image size (some themes create auto-thumbnails from post images)
- Image descriptions (for alt tags and image titles / descriptions)
- URLs (if linking link artwork to product pages, etc.)
If you need high quality, royalty-free professional stock images for your site, go here:
http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/stockimages
If you need artwork creation services, you can try one of these online freelancing services:
eLance: http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/elance
Freelancer: http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/freelancer
Fiverr lets you hire people to do things for you for $5: http://fiverr.com
4) Social Media Links
- Twitter Account URL
- Facebook Account URL (e.g. Business Page, or Vanity URL)
- LinkedIn URL
- YouTube URL
5) Additional / Optional Site Features
- 1 – 5 Client Testimonials. If you would like to add testimonials, make sure you have images, text, client / company names of testimonial givers and links to destination URLs.
- Product / Promotion Banners. If you would like to feature rotating images or banners on your site, then you will need to create these and note down their destination URLs (where you want visitors to go to when they click on your banners).
Note: Please ensure that all banners are of identical dimensions.
Tip: Try to keep your vertical banners no wider than 200 – 250 pixels. This will ensure that your ad banners work with most WordPress themes. Standard banner sizes that meet this requirement are as follows:
- Wide Skyscraper (160×600)
- Skyscraper (120×600)
- Rectangle (180×150)
- Square Button (125×125)
- Vertical Banner (120×240)
- Button 1 (120×90)
- Button 2 (120×60)
- Microbar (88×31)
Banner format = .jpg, .png, or .gif.
Additionally …
- YouTube video URLs of any videos you would like to add to page content.
- Resource Links: 3 – 5 sites you want to recommend to your visitors (can include your own links).
- RSS Feeds – If you would like to add industry or company-related news feeds to your blog. (Tip: ideally the RSS feed will be of a website that you own, so visitors will click through to your own content). If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, then go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
You can download a PDF version of this checklist here:
http://www.wpbusinessguides.com/dl/wpicontentchecklist
Congratulations! You are now ready to install WordPress on your domain!
Click one of the links below to continue …
Install WordPress Automatically Using cPanel