|pros • per • ly|

Installing WordPress

Now that you’ve set up your domain and hosting, you’re now ready start building your own unique website.

While there are many ways to build a website, we are looking to create a professional looking website in the most efficient way possible.  For beginners and veterans alike, we suggest using a content management system (CMS) called WordPress.  WordPress is basically an online publishing application that you’ll use to create your website (everything from it’s appearance to actually adding the content).

WordPress is a fantastic CMS with tons of extensibility and limitless customization.  It’s very SEO (search engine optimization) friendly and extremely robust.  Also, with the vast number of themes available for WordPress, you can be up and running with a professional looking website in no time.

Being that we strongly recommend using WordPress (referred to hereafter as WP), the rest of the instructions about how to build your website are given based on the assumption that you’re using WP.

The following tutorial will walk you through how to install WP on your website using HostGator.

Installing WordPress: 2 Options

Since we are using HostGator as our hosting company, we have two options when installing WordPress on to our website:

Option 1:  Use the Fantastico application in HostGator’s cPanel.

Option 2:  Install WordPress manually by using FTP.

We’ll go over just option 1 in the following tutorials because it is much easier.

Using Fantastico to Install WordPress

Fantastico is a software application that automatically installs WordPress onto your website.  If this option is available (which it will be if you use HostGator), than this is by far the easiest way to install WP.

Step 1: While in your cPanel, scroll down towards to bottom of the screen until you find the Software/Services section.

Click the Fantastico De Luxe icon.

Step 2: Click on the WordPress link in the left sidebar.

Step 3: Click on New Installation.

Step 4: Input the following information into their respective areas:

Install on domain:                    Select the domain on which you’re installing WP
Install in directory:                   Leave blank
Administrator-username:       admin
Password:                                   Your desired password
Admin nickname:                     Your desired nickname
Admin email:                             Your desired email address
Site name:                                   Your website’s name
Description:                               Description of what your website’s all about

Click Install WordPress.

Step 5: The following screen notifies you that it’s creating a database and database user to be used for WordPress.

Click Finish Installation.

Step 6: Take a final note of your WordPress username (should be “admin”) and your password.

Either bookmark or make a note of the URL that’s give here (yourdomain.com/wp-admin). This is the web address that you’ll type in to access the WordPress interface (to manage virtually everything on your site).

It may also be a good idea to enter your currently used email to receive a copy of the installation details.

Click Back to WordPress overview.

Step 7: Open a new tab or window in your web browser.  Type in your site’s admin URL that was given in the previous step (our example was: prosperlybeginners.com/wp-admin). Hit Enter.

Step 8: Input your username (admin) and password that you selected during the WordPress Install.  Click Log In.

Step 9: Welcome to WordPress!  You can consider this the “backend” of your website.  Here you will add pages and posts, alter the appearance of your website, add plugins, and more.

Over time you will become very well acquainted with the WordPress Admin interface, but feel free to take a few moments to browse around and get familiar with it.

Step 10: In a new tab or window in your web browser, type in the URL of your new website (e.g. prosperlybeginners.com).   Your new website should look like this:

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed WordPress on your new website!

*If you still see the default HostGator webpage, you may need to delete the default.html file on your website’s directory.  You can skip the following section if your screen matches the website screenshot above.

Change Your DNS Settings

The first thing we must do is to change our DNS settings to point to HostGator.

Shortly after completing your purchase of the hosting, you should receive an email from HostGator with some instructions on how to get started.   The most important section of the email is where they list your name servers.

Step 1: Make a note of the two name servers given in the email.

Step 2: Go to Name.com and log in to your account. *These instructions assume that you registered your domain with Name.com as was shown in the Buying a Domain tutorial.

Step 3: Click on Account at the top of the page.

Step 4: Click on the domain name for which you are setting up hosting.

Step 5: Click Edit Name Servers under Control Panel on the right side of the page.

Step 6: In the box under “Add Name Server,” type in the first name server (e.g. ns1929.hostgator.com) that HostGator provided you in your email.

Click Add.  Then do the same thing for the second name server.

Step 7: Click (Remove) next to each of the first four default name servers to take them off of the list.

The only name servers that should now be listed are the new ones for your HostGator account.

Welcome to Your New Website

Believe it or not, your website is now live and running.*  In a new window or tab, type in your domain name.  You should see a screen like this one:

This is HostGator’s default page for a newly hosted website.  It’s appearing because we haven’t uploaded any of our files to create our own web pages yet (don’t worry, that’s coming up).

There are a number of good resources for you here, particularly the Getting Starting and Video Tutorials links.

The first item on the screen is the cPanel Login.  The cPanel is basically the control panel for your hosting.  You will use it to perform various actions including creating a database, managing emails, adding other domains, and more.

If you’d like to check it out now, simply click on the cPanel Login link or type in “yourdomain.com/cpanel” in your web browser (replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name).  This is how you will access the cPanel from now on (you may want to bookmark it).

*HostGator says to allow 24-48 hours for the DNS change to propagate worldwide, so don’t be surprised if it’s taking a bit to see your website (or rather, HostGator’s default page).

Check out the next post in the series on how to install WordPress on your site.

Now that you’ve purchased your new domain (either by registering a new one or buying an existing domain), the next step is to buy and set up hosting for the domain.

Website hosting refers to the service of housing your website files on someone else’s servers.  In other words, when you buy hosting, you are purchasing that ability to put your files (that make up your website) on another company’s servers so that people can view your website on the World Wide Web.

In the following two tutorials, we walk you through each step you’ll take to buy and set up your new hosting.  When we’re done, you’ll have a shiny new website up and running.

Our favorite hosting company (by far) is HostGator.  The service is reliable, easy to use, has great customer service, and is priced very nicely.

If you choose to use HostGator, this tutorial will make it a walk in the park.  If you choose to host elsewhere, this will still be a good guide as to the general process of setting up hosting.

Let’s get to it.

Buying Web Hosting

Step 1: Go to HostGator and click on View Web Hosting Plans on the left side of the screen under the “Our Most Popular Hosting Plan” header.

Step 2: Choose the hosting plan that best suits your needs.

We suggest using the “Baby” hosting package, mostly because it allows you to host unlimited domains from one hosting account.  That’s basically the only difference between the Hatchling account and the Baby account that will matter for people.  This means you don’t have to buy more hosting for additional sites that you start.

If you know you’re only going to host one website, you can opt for the Hatchling account (you can always upgrade later).

Step 3: Click Order Now.

Step 4: Click the radio button next to “I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only.

Type in your domain name and domain extension (e.g. prosperlybeginners.com).

Click Next.

Step 5: Make sure all the information is correct, input a coupon code if you wish, and click Calculate Totals.

Step 6: Click the radio button next to “I am a new customer” and click Continue.

Step 7: Enter your personal and payment information.  Click the Yes radio button certifying that you’ve read the Terms and Conditions (after you’ve read them of course).  Then click Verify My Order.

Then click Process My Order.

Congratulations, you just bought some web hosting.

In the next tutorial I will show you how to set up hosting to get your site up and running.

Buying an Existing Domain

If the domain you want is already taken, there’s a good chance that you can buy that domain from the owner.  Again, I don’t mean going to a domain registrar like Actnowdomains.com and registering a new, never before registered domain. This is something you should and will do most of the time. I mean buying a domain name that someone else has registered but they are selling the name.

If, when you go to the domain, there isn’t a live site you can go to www.whois.net and find out the owners contact information and then contact them directly about buying the domain.

Sometimes you will type in a domain name into a browser and then see a live website but in reality it is just a parked page and there actually will be a link on the page that says “This Domain Might Be For Sale”. You can click on that link and then make an offer on the domain. You may or may not get a response but this is how I purchased my last domain.

Advantages to Buying an Existing Domain

I see two main advantages to purchasing an already existing domain. First, if your heart is set on a certain name and you don’t think that you can do business with any other name then you should try to buy the domain name from whoever owns it.

The second reason to buy an existing domain name is to take advantage of any previous link popularity the domain has. Many domains that are up for sale used to be active websites that were promoted by their webmasters.  Many of these old websites obtained many links pointing to their site and although the site has since shut down, the links remain. That leaves the opportunity for you to build a new website and take advantage of the old links pointing to that domain. Keep in mind that you need to put up a new site that is similar in nature to the previous website or the links will hold little to no value to you.

Use the Yahoo link feature I explained in step 9 of the section “Buying an Existing Website” to check if a domain has links pointing to it.

Resources:

Here is a list of some good websites to buy or sell domain names.

http://www.buydomains.com has hundreds of prime domains for sale.

http://www.afternic.com another good list of domains for sale.

http://www.sedo.com has a big selection of domains as well.

http://www.tdnam.com is a good place to find a very large selection of domain names for sale at a cheap price.

I have decided to put together some simple, easy to follow tutorials on starting a website from buying a domain to getting web hosting all the way to getting WordPress installed on your site. I hope these can be a real help to those of you who are beginners in the internet marketing world.

Check out the series links below to get everything you need to get started in the internet marketing world.