In recent times anyone looking to build their own website or blogging platform use WordPress. WordPress has become the primary content management system (CMS), allowing people to quickly build websites that are easy to maintain.
In the first part of the blog series I will cover the key steps for hosting,domain name and installing including my own personal experience.
Hosting provider
Firstly you will need to find a hosting provider, your hosting provider will typically provide space on a server for your website.
Important factor to consider when searching for a provider is cost, reliability of the service, back-up services.Also many of these providers provider a selections of applications such as wordpress that be installed with one just click.
I chose Blacknight as my service provider, the process involved providing documentation to prove my identity before the service was activated. Other popular providers include Hostgator and Bluehost.
Domain name
Next you must decide on a name for your website. There are many companies who provide domain name services and your hosting provider will typically provide this service.
You can search for available domain names for your website and you can register more than one extensions.
For example, www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.co.uk.
I chose GoDaddy for my domain name registration and paid extra for private registration as I didn’t want my personal details on the public WhoIs directory
Domain names and Name servers configuration
If you use the same Service provider for your domain name registration and hosting you can usually skip this step as it will typically be automatically associated.
If you are using different providers you will need to perform the 2 steps below.
Step 1: Associate your domain name with your hosting provider.
Thus for my website, I associated my godaddy registered domain name(conorfi.com) with my hosting provider blacknight, this support document explains this process
Step2: Associate your hosting provider name-servers with your domain name provider.
Here i simply obtained the name-server settings from my hosting provider Blacknight and then updated my Go-daddy(domain name registration provider)Name Server settings.
The updating of name servers typically take 24 hours.
Here are the related articles for the 2 above steps for Hostgator and Bluehost.
At this point now when you navigate to your domain name in a browser it should re-direct you to the default page of your hosting provider rather than the hosting page of your domain name registration provider.
WordPress install
My hosting provider like so many others provided one click install of word-press. This process installs php, MySQL and WordPress.The installation typically takes approximately 10 minutes.
If you wish to do theses steps manually see this article on Installing WordPress.
At this point now when you navigate to your domain name in a browser it should re-direct you to the default page of WordPress.
Take a tour around WordPress
Now you can login in to your website.
- Navigate to <your_website_name>/wp-admin )(example.com/wp-admin)
- Username is admin
- The password is the password your set during the installation
Now feel free to take a tour around wordpress, this in a great initial guide.
In part 2 of this blog we will cover the important topic of securing and backing up your WordPress website.
Summary
In this blog we have covered a number of WordPress topics such as hosting,domain names and installation.
In the next blogs of this series I will cover creating a wide range of subjects including
- Part 2 – WordPress Security and Backups
- WordPress Themes and useful configuration tips
- How to configure WordPress concepts such as featured-images and setting your home page and blog.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): On-page and off-page factors.
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