I have created a number of websites for friends and family over the years using WordPress, and as these projects were all private websites I used Akismet to block spam. Akismet is without doubt the best comment spam prevention tool out there and I would really recommend it for any personal sites you may be building. Unfortunately Akismet carries a charge for commercial projects and not wanting to pass any additional cost on to my client I started to search for solutions.

I quickly discovered (and I must stress I am not an expert in this), that you can modify a servers .htaccess file to allow certain privileges dependant on IP address. Quite simply, if you are receiving WordPress spam you can take a note of the IP and deny it from hitting the server.

Here is how I am doing it…

<Limit GET POST PUT>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from 69.197.28.105
</Limit>

So every time I get more spam, I add the IP, like this…

<Limit GET POST PUT>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from 69.197.28.105
Deny from 65.55.3.211
</Limit>

Sounds pretty simply right! Well yeah it is, but be careful as the .htaccess controls the access to all parts of your website and one incorrect key-stroke could take a site down or parts of a site down completely. To be safe I would always take a copy of the original .htaccess and save it somewhere just in case!

Conclusion

I suppose there is always the potential that you could be blocking some legitimate users but so far I have only seen the spam to my sites improve while traffic stays the same, and hey it’s FREE!

This is abit of a quick post but without knowing this I wouldn’t have been able to create my first WordPress site so successfully.  If you have never used WordPress before and you are fairly new to CSS then creating a site by this method can be difficult, hopefully this post will help.

Setting up you first WordPress site can an interesting and challenging experience, however, it may not be as difficult as you first might think.  Here are my tips to creating your first successful WordPress site.

Setup your site locally first

My advice to anyone new to wordpress would be to setup your site on your own PC and then transfer it to a web server once you are happy with it. Wamp server gives you the ability to setup a virtual web server with full database access and PHP admin support on your own  machine making the development easy and best of all free.

Install WordPress and start your theme

Once your local server is ready install the latest version of WordPress to the server (Full installation instructions are available from wordpress.org site), the default theme is fairly boring so you can either download a pre-designed theme or create your own, I would recommend the later with clean semantic themes available from Elliot Jay Stocks with Starkers and Sandox created by Scott Allan Wallick and Andy Skelton which give you an excellent blank canvas to create your own theme from.

Once your site is ready upload it to the web

When you are ready to upload your site to an online space I would recommend the excellent post from webdesignerwall.com on  Exporting and Importing WordPress, this should be all you need to get your site live.

Without Sandox I wouldn’t have been able to create this site, I hope some of these links will help you in your journey to create your first WordPress site