Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Have you ever wondered what powers www.MintyWhite.com, or wanted to try and make a site as brilliant and interactive as this one? A great open source web tool, called WordPress, ‘runs’ the virtual side of the site and provides you with all the great content that you’re seeing on your screen today!

Rich wrote guides on turning your computer into a local web server and then installing WordPress, so that you can learn everything about WordPress before using it online. Once you’ve mastered the basics of WordPress, how exactly do you put your wonderful creation online?

You’ll need to start with both a domain name (such as www.MintyWhite.com) – if you don’t already have one, read my guide on customized e-mail addresses, which will take you through getting a domain name and setting up e-mail. You can get domains from a registrar, such as 123-reg.co.uk and from most hosting providers, including Tsohost and Godaddy, who offer a domain either inclusive or as an addon to a hosting package. This is the simplest way of setting your domain name up because the hosting provider will automatically put in all the difficult details that need to be entered!

If you don’t already have a hosting package or domain name, Tsohost have given us two cPanel Pro packages which we are giving away – see the competition.

You will also need a web host, who rent you part of a server. For a simple website with less than 100 visitors a month, it is safe to go for a ‘Lite’ package, which would cost around £15 per year in the UK (Tsohost) and $48 dollars per year in the US (Godaddy).

However, if you were looking at any more visitors or needed more web space, it is worth looking at a higher (and more expensive) package. For example, the ‘Standard’ package costs £35 per year with Tsohost and offers 2.5GB of web space and 20GB of bandwidth (amount transferred to/from your site every month from visitors), which is a lot more than enough for a personal site (especially for WordPress) – their Pro package is only a little more and would be great for a business site. If you are interested in the pro package, don’t forget the competition!

There are, of course, a lot more expensive hosting platforms, which could cost in excess of $10000 or £7000 yearly to run, however that is only if you are getting thousands (if not millions) of hits!

Once you have signed up for the domain and hosting, you should be able to install WordPress easily. To confirm that you have, visit your new domain name. If you get an error such as “Forbidden” or “User needs to upload data” that shows the server is working! I will show you how to do this using Fantastico De Luxe and cPanel, available with Tsohost and many other small hosts (and some large ones too!).

1. To start, log in to your cPanel account and open Fantastico De Luxe. In my case, it was the icon of the smiley face at the bottom of the page:

   

2. Then click the WordPress option on the left-hand side
3. Click “New Installation”

   

4. Enter the information as you require, for example:

1. Click Install WordPress and then Finish Installation
2. WordPress is then automatically installed and set up.

You now have a fresh WordPress installation on your blog. To access the admin section, just add /wp-admin. For example, to access the admin for mywordpressblog.com, I go to mywordpressblog.com/wp-admin.

Enjoy and remember to enter the competition for your chance to win a cPanel Pro package with Fantastico.

For more information about WordPress, be sure to visit www.wordpress.org.

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