WordPress is a great tool if you want to publish your thoughts on the internet. It is easy to use and administrate. It works “straight forward”.
Today I want to give you a little overview about your first steps with WordPress, especially about WordPress installation and hosting.
Hosting And Installation
One easy way to set up your WordPress blog is to register an account at wordpress.com. It’s easy and you can usually run your WordPress blog within minutes.
If you want to run your blog with your own WordPress installation on your webspace, you can choose either to install it by yourself or use a webhosting plan which supports WordPress.
Some hosting companies offer hosting plans with pre-installed WordPress or they’ll allow you to install WordPress on-demand with just a few mouseclicks. HostGator, for example, offers some interesting plans for WordPress hosting. This is a great way to start blogging, because, you don’t need to bother with the installation.
Another advantage is that webhosting plans usually allow you to register your own domain name and point it to the blog. So you can run your blog under something like www.yourdomain.tld, instead of www.yourname.someoneelse.tld. This will let you change your hosting provider in the future, without changing your domain name, because if you move your blog, you can also move your domain.
If you are familiar with ftp-uploads, you can also go to wordpress.org, download the latest build of WordPress, unpack it on your computer and upload the files to your webserver through FTP. Of course you need a webhosting package which meets the WordPress requirements. After calling the URL in your Browser, the installation screen will be displayed. WordPress comes with a very easy installation procedure. You will be asked for a few things like:
- Your MySQL-Database settings. If you don’t know them, ask your provider
- Your Email
- Admin username
Only a few mouseclicks later, installation will be usually finished and you can start configuring you blog.
After installation of WordPress you should set a few basic settings in the WordPress admin panel, like link-structure, blog title etc. More about WordPress configuration in one of my next posts.