Setting Up Wordpress On Your Own Web Host…. Step By Step For Newbies
This is not intended as a replacement for the installation instructions provided by Wordpress, it is to fill in some of the blanks after the basics are in place, for those of us with little to no knowledge of HTML, PHP, etc. Installing Wordpress on your webhost is the easy part, the “fun” part is configuring all the seemingly simple things to get it up and running the way you want. You will need to use some code, so I’m going to share what I learned in the process so you don’t have to spend as much time digging around for it as I did.
Installation
First, of course, is to install Wordpress on your webhost. If you still haven’t decided which host you be using, click here for a comparison chart of many of the popular providers. Most webhosts will have it included, so all you have to do is click a couple of buttons & the core is set up for you. Log in to your cpanel and click on the fantastico icon. (or the equivalent in the control panel provided by your webhost) Click on Wordpress, fill in the blanks, and submit - everything will be set up for you automatically.
*It is a good idea to install Wordpress in a subfolder, so just specify a name for that folder when filling in the blanks for setup. After initial setup, it will give you a link to your Wordpress Admin. Click on that, bookmark the page, and log in with the details you specified during setup. Then follow the directions at the following website to setup your blog to run from the main page of your website. Be sure to bookmark this page first, so you can come back to finish the rest of the steps.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory
Removing Index.php From Your Website Address
If you don’t modify the .htaccess file, you would have to type in www.YourWebsiteAddress.com/index.php to get to your wordpress site. If you just type in your website address, you (or anyone else who goes to your domain name) will see the list of files and folders that you have in your root directory. That is not good at all. To fix this, using the file manager in control panel, go to the root directory of your website, click on .htaccess, select Edit File. On the line after:
# END Wordpress
Paste the following:
DirectoryIndex index.php index.htm index.html
Save the file and you should now be able to go directly to your website.
Making Your Post URL’s Search Engine and User Friendly
If you don’t edit this setting, the URL’s to your individual posts will basically be your website address followed by a forward slash and series of symbols and numbers. That doesn’t tell other people or the search engines anything about the subject of your post. To avoid that problem, make the following changes:
Log in to your WP-Admin site — go to Options — Permalinks — Select “Custom, Specify Below” — paste the following code:
/%postname%/
Now when you create a post, the direct link will be www.YourWebsiteAddress.com/TitleOfThePost
… Or if you would like it to display something shorter, specify the title you would like it to have in the “Post Slug” section on the right hand side of the page when you are writing or editing a post.
Selecting and Installing a Theme
Make sure when deciding on a theme that it is compatible with the current version of Wordpress that you have installed. You can go to Wordpress.org to look through available themes, or do a search on google. You can have several themes installed so that you can try them out and decide which will work best for what you are looking for. Click here for a list of some my personal favorites that are compatible with the current version of Wordpress:
Once you have selected the theme(s) you want, download them onto your computer, unzip them with a free program like jzip. Then you will need to ftp (upload) the unzipped files to your webhost. You can either use one of the many free ftp programs available, or if you are using Windows Vista, it is already built in to your computer. Further Instructions for setting up ftp in Windows Vista are available here:
To install your themes, navigate to the directory that you have installed Wordpress in — click on WP-Content — click on Themes — then upload the unzipped files using your ftp program or by dragging and dropping to that folder if you are using Vista.
Log in to your Wordpress Admin and go to Presentation — Themes — select the theme that you want to use. That’s it.
Installing Plug-Ins
There are several Plug-Ins available at Wordpress.org that you may find useful. Make sure any plug-in is compatible with current version of Wordpress. Once you have downloaded the files, you will upload them to your site the same way as you did with the themes, except they will go in the wp-content/plugins folder instead of the themes folder. Also, once it is installed, you will need to go to your Wordpress Admin, go to the plugins page, and activate each of the plug-ins you have installed. Here a couple to start with just to help with backups and spam.
……continue to Customizing & Adding Adsense To Your Wordpress Blog