Internet Marketing Legacy

This article discusses the details of setting up a Wordpress blog on your own domain. To proceed, I’m assuming you’ve already gone through the steps of purchasing and setting up your own domain.

Before I go too far, let’s talk about the Wordpress program itself. Wordpress is an open source, publicly created program which is free for the whole world to use. It is written entirely in PHP and runs off of a MySQL database. If you don’t know what that means, it’s no big deal. You don’t need to know PHP or MySQL to have a fully-functioning Wordpress blog on your website.

The easiest way, by far, to set up Wordpress on your own domain is to use cPanel with Fantastico. This combination of web-host software makes installing Wordpress a breeze. I strongly recommend that you purchase web hosting from a hosting service which has cPanel with Fantastico. Hostgator is my favorite web hosting service because they have everything I need and very good service..

To install Wordpress from cPanel with Fantastico, follow these steps:

1. Login to cPanel at your website (usually www.yourdomain.com/cpanel).
2. Find the icon that says, “Fantastico” and click on it.
3. On the left side, click the Wordpress link.
4. From the Wordpress panel, click “New Installation”
5. Choose which domain you’re installing Wordpress onto.
6. If you’re installing your blog into a different directory than your root directory, enter a directory name. If the Wordpress blog will be powering the entire site, leave the directory blank.
7. Enter your Admin username and password. This is the username and password you will use to login to the blog’s wp-admin section to make any changes.
8. Enter your admin nickname (this will show up in your posts and comments)
9. Enter the admin email address which will be used to contact you as the administrator. Make sure this email address actually exists. I always create a separate admin email address for my blog such as wpadmin@mydomain.com
10. Enter the site name and description. This is what will initially show up in the header of your blog.
11. Enter your email account information. This will also be used if you will be posting to your blog via email. You will need your POP/SMTP server name (usually mail.mydomain.com), username, and password.
12. Press “Install Wordpress”
13. Next you’ll see an overview screen showing you that you are about to create a MySQL database, username, etc. Press “Finish Installation” to continue.
14. Finally, you see the summary screen telling you that the Wordpress blog was installed. Make a not of the directory location, username, password, etc.
15. You’re finished.

If you do not have cPanel / Fantastico, you can visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress for step-by-step guide to installing Wordpress from scratch.

To start using your blog, go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin and login with the username and password you setup during installation.

My next article will focus on the important steps you should take to tweak your blog for best money-making potential. Stay tuned…

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 7:32 am and is filed under The Journey, Website Setup, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.