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.