Setup A Wordpress Website
How to setup a Wordpress site in cPanel
Wordpress allows you to use the Wordpress Website Publishing Software on your own server or on server space you are renting from your web hosting company. This tutorial outlines the steps to setup a WP site on your own server with cPanel and also how to setup a Wordpress site manually:
Pre-Wordpress setup steps
- Register your domain name with your favorite domain name registrar.
- Setup a web hosting account. To find a web host that is right for you, read about choosing the right web host.
- Point your Domain Name Servers (DNS) to the appropriate addresses. If you’re not sure about DNS, consult your webhost.
Setup Wordpress using cPanel (Reseller Web Hosting)
cPanel is the back-end admin control panel you use to set up all the different aspects of your website including email, mysql databases, Wordpress and hundreds of other options. A quality web host should have a cPanel or other admin interface that makes setting up your website a snap.
This example is step-by-step instructions to setup a Wordpress site using cPanel on the DownTownHost UNIX reseller hosting service. (steps may be slightly different for other reseller web hosts)
- Login to your user Web Host Manager website.
- Click “Create A New Account” and follow instructions. When finished…
- Click “List Accounts”. Find the newly created account, review the info for accuracy, then click the cPanel icon. (your cPanel can also found at http://www.yourwebsite.com/cpanel)
- Log into your cPanel account using the username and password created in step 2.
- Find “Software / Services” menu (scroll down towards the bottom), then click the “Fantastico De Luxe” icon.
- Find and click the “WordPress” link in the left hand column under “Blogs”.
- Click the “New Installation” link.
- Fill in the “Admin access data”, update your “Admin e-mail” then click “Install”.
- Click “Finish Installation”.
- Click “http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/”, then use the username and password (Admin access data) created in Step 8 to login to your Wordpress admin site.
- Click “Visit Site” to see your new Wordpress website.
Customize Wordpress website
Wordpress Themes
Wordpress Plugins
- Check your domain and you should see the standard blue top wordpress default theme.
- Make initial SEO optimizations to the blog. We’re going to have a step by step process detailed to seo optimization to your wordpress blog.
- Get your theme. For this, I took the recommendations of the eurekadiary, which had a ton of insight and was my guide as I installed my first phpbay site. There are thousands of free themes out there and plenty of people offering custom ones. I’d find a nice free two or three column site that you like. Brian Gardner has a nice 3 column design called ‘ for my first site.
- Upload your theme and plugins. The minimal plugins you need are the all in one seo pack and phpbaypro.
*note, when you buy and unzip phpbay pro, be sure you find the phpBay folder to upload into your plugins folder, not the phpBay_plugins folder. If once you’ve uploaded the phpbay plugin and logged into your admin account through wordpress and don’t see it in the page to be activated then you’ve uploaded the wrong folder.
10. Activate All in one Seo.
11. Activate and Set up phpBay pro (see exact steps to set up phpbay pro here.)
Wordpress Basic / Initial SEO Optimization
Log in and click on settings > General. Fill in this information. You can change your blog title and taglines whenever, but the first few things to do is change the wordpress address (url) and Blog address (url) to contain the ‘www’s. Adding the www’s is personal preference, but which ever you choose you need to be sure to be consistent throughout all your linking, and the general consensus is to use the www’s but you can go either way, don’t let it hold you back, mmmkay? Click permalinks, select custom structure and put in /%postname%/. This makes your urls look pretty and contain keywords. This gives you some code to add to your .htaccess file. (open up notepad and copy the entire file there and save it as .htaccess (yes, include the “.”) and upload it to the root directory of your site (normally in public_html). You’re actually going to need one more bit of code to add to the .htaccess file in a later step, so just leave it open for now and you can upload it later.
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