As promised…today we’ll talk about plain English instructions for installing WordPress on your server. Please feel free to comment with any questions or issues. I’m happy to help.
Here are the “official” instructions from Wordpress in case you get stuck. There are helpful tips if you run into problems as well as screenshots.
What you’ll need:
- A place to house your blog (I use GearHost). Typically, any hosting company can provide this. Make sure that your plan includes at least 1 MySQL database.
- A domain – www.mywebsitename.com. You can purchase a personalized domain at Network Solutions or any domain registrar.
- An FTP client so you can upload your files to your web server.
- A web browser.
- An hour to get the blog installed.
Step 1: After you purchase your hosting package from any hosting company, login to your hosting Control Panel provided by your hosting company. This is typically an online system. Most companies use a similar system, so these instructions should work for you. Contact the hosting company’s support team if you can’t figues this out.
- If necessary, set-up your domain on your web server. Make sure that the directory that will house your blog has “Anonymous Read/Write” permissions.
- Set-up your MySQL database within the control panel. Give the database a database name, user name and password. Also note whether the path to your server’s PHP is something other than “localhost”. For example, my path is “Server Location: mysql2.gearhost.com”. Write this information down as you will need it later.
- Logout of your web server’s control panel.
Step 2: Go to Network Solutions (or your registrar for your domain) and change the default DNS settings to the DNS for your web server. Your hosting company can help you with this. It will be something like NS1.DomainNameServer.Net or an IP address.
Step 3: Go to www.wordpress.org and download the latest version of WordPress onto your local drive. Extract it using any zip file extractor.
- Open your FTP program and connect to your server. (Your hosting company should provide you with FTP settings – Host, User Name and Password.)
- Navigate to your domain’s directory (likely the root directory).
- On your local drive, navigate to the directory that contains WordPress.
- Upload ALL of the WordPress files to your web server.
Step 4: Find the WordPress file on your local drive called “wp-config-sample.php”. It should be located in the root directory of WordPress.
- Open the file in Notepad.
- Go back to the database information that you wrote down a few minutes ago.
- Enter that information into the “wp-config-sample.php” file – database name, user name, password and path to PHP.
- When you save the file, re-name it “wp-config.php”.
- Upload that file to the Wordpress directory on the web server.
Step 5: Open your browser and go to www.mywebsitename.com/wp-admin. You should see a screen that prompts you for a Blog Name and Email address. Don’t worry – you can change this later.
- Enter a blog name and you active email address.
- Click “Install WordPress”.
- The next screen provides you with an admin user name and password. Record this information as you may need it later.
- Click “Login”.
Congratulations! You just installed your WordPress blog!
Do a little testing and play around with it to ensure that everything is working properly.
Tomorrow – the fun part! All kinds of cool themes!
