Ultimate tips to start a Wordpress blog

When you think start a new wordpress blog , many small decisions will make very much difference about your blog’s future.

Doing the things rightly from the beginning will you save a lot of time later.

Firstly, install WordPress on your PC hard drive, you will get a working offline blog . The experiments on theme, plugins will be faster and safer. Here is the guide on how you can install WordPress on your Windows 7 PC.
Choose a good theme. There are hundreds of free themes available for WordPress. Preferably choose one that have valid xhtml. Here is the complete guide on choosing WordPress themes.
Customize the theme by modifying the CSS in the test blog: create 4 or 5 dummy posts where there are photos, lists, text, a video from youtube or similar. If everything is OK, then go ahead and install the theme.
Create a page about you. Visitors might be curious and want to know about who does the writing and this will serve the purpose. Here is the guide to create an about us page.
Create a contact form. If the theme you have chosen does not have a contact us form, use some plugin. Read this article to know the importance of contact us form.
Plan content structure: categories and tags. The categories for the strong ratings and the tags will be the same like categories. This will create an uniform structure.
Decide whether you will link to sites that you recommend (high-traffic sites) or friends blogs and websites, the first will give you quality, the second links.
Choose the plugins those are useful for you. Akismet which comes bundled with wordpress. You can use Platinum SEO plugin or All in One SEO pack.
Permalinks: Choose custom structure and use ‘% postname%’, that will be more comfortable for your visitors and for search engines. This option is only available if your server runs Apache (usually based on linux) and has enabled some options, so ask before your hosting.
Check that everything works, do it with multiple browsers , at least with Firefox and Internet Explorer.