A few weeks ago our state government here in Queensland announced that an election will be held in 4 weeks time (one week from today). I have an interest in state-level politics and had long considered starting a site dedicated to the topic. With the election announcement I figured there is no better time than right now, and so I set about launching the QldVoice.org blog that very same day.
The Basics
The first thing you will need for any new site is a domain name and web hosting. I already had a domain name I had purchased for this, and use a reseller account with Jumba for all of my sites. If you are starting from scratch it only takes a few minutes to register a domain name and purchase a hosting account.
Naturally I planned to build the site on WordPress, the world’s leading blogging software and my own preferred choice of development platforms.
Check out my guide for how to install WordPress.
The Site Design
As a recent convert to the Thesis theme it was an easy decision to use it for this site. The built-in design options and the framework behind it all makes customization quick and easy, and the strong SEO helps the new blog perform well in search results quickly. To speed up development time I chose a simple colour scheme that is relevant to our state of Queensland and kept the overall design very light and clean with no flashy graphics or effects. The few graphics and the custom code for the design took a little over an hour for me.
The Plugins
No WordPress blog is complete without at least a handful of plugins. Here are the plugins that make QldVoice.org work:
Akismet – the essential comment spam protection plugin for WordPress
Contact Form 7 – my personal favourite of all the contact form plugins. I use this to power the Contact and Write for Us pages.
Countdown Timer – this is the first time I’ve used this plugin and I love how easy it was. I use it to display a real time countdown to the polls opening on election day.
Maintenance Mode – this was active during the few hours that the site was under development. I haven’t needed to use it since but some people make frequent use of this plugin when they are doing re-designs.
Role Manager – I found this plugin necessary because it is a multi-author blog and I wanted to permit my contributors to upload images.
StatPress – I use this plugin for real time stats analysis. Google Analytics is a far more powerful analysis package but StatPress lets you keep an eye on things while you want for Google Analytics to update.
Subscribe to Comments – an essential plugin for keeping your visitors coming back. This plugin lets a comment author be notified by email when someone else comments on the same post.
Tweet This – adds a “Tweet This” button to posts so readers can quickly Tweet your blog to their followers. I had to disable it recently because it was throwing errors into the page every now and then.
WP-DB-Backup – backups are very important and this plugin lets you schedule automatic database backups and have them emailed to you.
WP Polls – I run regular polls on the blog and this plugin makes the process quick and easy.
FeedSmith – I always install FeedSmith to redirect the blog’s feed URLs to my Feedburner account.
Google Sitemap Generator – helps the Google bots crawl your site.
Integration of these plugins into the blog via custom code and widgets took about an hour.
The Content
Right from the start I wanted QldVoice.org to present content from many different political views. I also knew the amount of time I could dedicate to writing for it in the leadup to the election was minimal due to some major personal events that fell in the same period and could not be moved. I sent out a Tweet asking for anyone interested in blogging about the election to send me a message. I received several responses that day and had a small team of contributors ready to go (some of which were drafting blog posts while I was still coding the site).
Thanks to their support the site went live with good content straight away without me having to spend hours writing it all. It also meant the site was up and running the same day as the election announcement.
The Twitter Account
I knew that I wanted to use Twitter to promote the blog and also to engage in conversation but did not want to use my personal Twitter account for it. So I created a new Twitter account of @QldVoice, integrated it with the blog, and started following other Twitter users that were relevant to the topic (high profile local Twitter users, political candidates, and local media).
The End Result
All up it took me about 3 hours to launch this new WordPress blog. The biggest time saver was using Thesis as the theme for the site which meant I did not waste hours developing a custom theme from scratch or messing about with free themes and trying to get them looking the way I wanted to.
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Hi Paul,
This is a great post on showing people where to look when they are in a hurry. I may suggest adding a link to a Wordpress Installation Tutorial of some kind.
Also, the list of plug-ins you have provided had my attention. Have you tried Sociable? It is a great plugin for posting to social networks.
Cheers,
Alpay
Good idea Alpay, I’ve added the link to my post on how to install WordPress.
I’ll be sure to check out Sociable as well.
I still don’t know why Thesis is so popular. I look at it one time and saw that we have to pay a lof of $$, I just simply skip it. I think Sadish Balla’s Themes or Nurudin Jauhari’s Themes are okay for me. But hey, your ad caught my attention. May be I’ll give take a look at it again. Thanks.
Yes it can look expensive at face value. I think for a lot of people they have an “ah ha!” moment when they realise how Thesis makes customizations possible in such a simple yet powerful way.
But the best thing I like about it is how it lets you set up a nice, clean blog theme without touching a line of code so you can get on with the more important tasks for launching a new blog.
Paul,
Amazing. That’s what my Johny comes late impression. :-) Rather than changing all the codes and search for missing “;” or “>”, I think I will go for it once I get a better idea on how to work with plugin or changing the text etc. Thanks.
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