Setting Up Your WordPress Website

Once you’ve bought your domain name and set up your hosting, you’re well on your way!
Now it’s time to get your website up and running.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install WordPress to your domain.

Installing WordPress

There are two possible ways to install WordPress, one MUCH easier than the other.

1. One-Click-installation for Websites using WordPress
Almost every reliable and well-established hosting company has integrated 1-click-installation for WordPress, which makes getting going a snap.

If you signed up with Siteground or any other similar hosting company, you should find your “1-click-installation” in your account Control Panel.

Here are the steps you should follow (should be similar/same on all the major web hosting companies):
• 1. Log in to your hosting account.
• 2. Go to your control panel.
• 3. Look for the “WordPress” icon. (Sometimes called “WordPress Installer”
• 4. Fill in the details of your site. i.e Domain name, User name, password etc etc. ( If it asks for Site Name and Site Description, these can be changed once the WordPress site is installed)
There could be other options. Most are OK with the default settings already chosen.
• 5. Click the “Install” button and WordPress will be installed and then you should get access to your NEW WordPress website.
Need a little more help installing WordPress? If your still not sure about this please contact me and I can walk you through this.

Manual install (if needed)

If for some odd reason (some hosting companies don’t provide one-click-install for WordPress) you don’t have the possibility to install WordPress automatically, look this manual guide below:

NOTE: This is not as straight forward as the 1 click option as you have to set up a database etc which is pretty confusing.

Pssst – if they don’t have 1-click-installation, maybe you’re dealing with a bad host!

1) Download WordPress from here: http://wordpress.org/download
This will download a zip file of all the files required for you to upload to your server.

2) Create a new folder on your desktop and unzip WordPress in it

3) Look for a file named wp-config-sample.php and rename it to: wp-config.php

4) Now open the wp-config.php (with notepad for example) and fill the following lines:
The details below should be taken from the database you would have set up before you got to this point.

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database_name_here’); – Database name (if you don’t know it, ask this from your hosting support)
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username_here’); – Your hosting username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password_here’); – Your hosting password

After you have filled the gaps, save the file.

5) Now log into your hosting ftp (download FileZilla for that). The FTP address is usually ftp.yourdomain.com, username and password are the same that you used to register to your host.

6) If there is any file named “index” already on your hosting account the – delete it. After that upload all the files from your WordPress folder to your FTP server.

7) Once you have completed the previous steps, go the URL: yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php

This is the page you should see:

Just fill in the form fields and you are ready to click Install WordPress!

AGAIN… Pssst – if they don’t have 1-click-installation, maybe you’re dealing with a bad host!

Now once this has been done you will get a success message and a link to log in with..
Generally this is YourDomain.co/wp-admin

Go and login to to your new WordPress back end ( Admin Area) using the username or email address and password you used to set the WP site up with.

Have a look around and then follow on with the next Session I have lined up for you.