First thing I did was check out what was the battery model I was looking for. The Nokia BL-5F for N95. A quick search on ebay found batteries for under £5 however there is no way that a new genuine battery will cost less than £5. I decided to do a quick search on Google for “Nokia N95 battery”. This came up with a load of results but none from a known seller with a good reputation. I kept searching and eventually found my saviour: play.com.

For £16.95 they delivered within a few days and my phone was back up and running.

I also needed a battery cover because the sellotape on the back of my phone would probably start looking a bit shabby after a while. I opted for Amazon and went through a third party (888 accessories). The battery cover was the genuine thing.

Obviously I know the battery life on the N95 is very poor so here are some tips:

1. Upgrade your firmware to the latest version because that really helps (Using Nokia update)
2. Don’t leave applications open after you have finished with them
3. Turn Bluetooth off
4. Turn your phone to GSM mode only or whatever mode you need for your region.
5. Read up on: WikiHow

• Board of Canada
  Tracks: Constants Are Changing, Sherbert Head, Slow This Bird Down etc
  Album: The Campfire Headphase
  Reason: Very chilled out, can play in background without noticing
• Portishead
  Tracks: Strangers, Sour Times, Pedestral
  Album: Dummy
  Reason: Like the big room feel to it and the trip hop genre in general
• Cinematic Orchestra
  Tracks: The awakening of a woman
  Album: Cinematic Orchestra
  Reason: So cinematic, plays in the background without realising
• Moby
  Tracks: Down Slow, Run On, The Sky Is Broken
  Album: Play
• Elbow
  Tracks: I’ve got your number, Buttons and Zips
  Album: A cast of Thousands
• Thievery Corporation
  Tracks: Marching The Hate Machines, The Cosmic Game, A Gentle Dissolve
  Album: The Cosmic Game

Obviously some people will look through the list and think awesome this guy knows his stuff, others will think who the hell are they? and some of you will head off and download some of the tracks and find that it works for you. Zen Habits also suggests a good tranquil music list.

If your a music person then post your favourite tracks for relaxing in the comments.

I am going to assume you have installed the blog and have logged in as a user into the dashboard. Ready? Lets go!

1/ Themes + Plugins

First of all find yourself a nice theme. I like the ones listed in Smashing Magazine. Download a theme and place it in wp-content/themes then click on design > themes and enable it. Looking good!

Next: Plugins. I recommend WP-Cache, WP-Contact Form and Sociable. But there are many more just have a quick look on google for “top wordpress plugins”.

2/ Activate Akismet and get an Akismet login Key

Click on Plugins. Under Akismet click activate. Then click on Akismet Configuration and follow the instructions to get a wordpress.com account if you don’t already have one. Once you have an Akismet key from wordpress.com copy it into the configuration page.

This will stop those pesky spammers from leaving comments on your blog.

3/ Fiddle with the settings!

Its time to look under the bonnet. Click on the settings page, have a flick through and change the obvious ones which I don’t need to cover here.

- One setting you should change is Permalinks. Under common settings I would recommend “Month and Name”. This will make your blog much more search engine friendly and bring in the visitors.

- Another setting you should look at is under Writing. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see a section called Update Services. I recommend you add some more websites to this list. A good list of suggestions can be found in this wordpress blog.

4/ Secure your Wordpress

It is a very good idea to keep your wordpress secured. I am not going to re-write this section because people much cleverer than me have already done that and why clog the internet! Check out: here and here. The one I particularly recommend is removing what version of Wordpress you are running from displaying on your site. This involves modifying the header page.

5/ Bookmark the dashboard page so you can quickly access it

Alternatively you may wish to use a weblog client to edit posts.

6/ Get Google Analytics

If you are serious about webdesign you need to track your visitors. For this I recommend Google Analytics (Free) combined with Google Analytics plugin.

7/ Learn!

There are a lot of good sites out there that cover Wordpress so do a quick search on Google and see what you come across.

Of course this is not the only initial Wordpress article on the web. A good one has been written by Download Squad.