How to create your own website with wordpress

Lately, I notice that more and more people are getting interested in blogging and I have friends and former classmates asking me on setting up a blog for them. It’s funny because before, whenever they’d ask me what I do online and why I’m so hooked up in blogging, they give me a bewildered look when I try to explain my work. So, to spare everyone the confusion, here are some steps that I can share on how to create a website of your own.

1. Niche. What are you trying to do? Are you selling something online, a hand-made product? You need to determine what you want to do or put in your blog or website written down on a piece of paper if you need to, because this is your guide in setting up your online presence. If you will be blogging for Entertainment and Lifestyle for instance, you then have a clear idea of what stories to put on your blog. If you want to sell pre-loved items, there are free websites that will offer you hosting at no cost provided that you will allow them to insert their own advertisement on your space.

2. Hosting. Hosting is where you park your domain (see #3) it is where you house your website. There are two types of hosting available for you; you can have a self-hosted website or blog which is a space online that you basically rent from another webhosting seller both on monthly or yearly terms. And there are also free hosts that offer you quite a good deal provided that they insert their own advertisements but some don’t. Self-hosted blogs or websites gives you more flexibility because you control what you put in it, whereas free hosted blogs have limited features and at most times, paying sites don’t give much consideration to most free hosted blogs should you decide to apply for monetization programs.

3. Domain name. Simply put, a domain name is your address in the World Wide Web, where people go to find you. A domain name is also popularly known as a URL or a homepage. An example of a domain name is http://www.yahoo.com. In order for your online venture to get recognition and success, you need to think of an easy to remember and catchy name that also describes the whole theme of your website among other things. You may also encounter the term “tld” it means top level domain or it is the ordered groupings within a system, you either decide to get a higher or lower level of domain name, for example www.yahoo.com is a top level domain and the .com extension might be a little expensive unlike the generic ones, while www.yahoo.info will be considered as a generic domain name, whereas using “.info” makes you in the lower order of the hierarchy. There are hosting companies that sells domain names with free hosting or just the domain names without hosting.

4. Setting up your domain name to your webhosting. Once you bought your domain name and hosting, you now need to direct your address to your hosting. Upon successful application of your hosting, you will be given dns settings or domain name settings that you need to configure with your domain name. An example of a dns is “ns1.hosting.com” you need to log in to your domain host to configure your dns settings. Your DNS settings will connect your domain name to your webhost, and would usually take 72 hours propagation. After which, you can now install your website contents or your preferred content software. Most popular today is Wordpress, used by both businesses and individuals. Wordpress is an easy website or blog publishing tool that doesn’t require a lot of work just to install and accomplish it.

5. Installing Wordpress. There are hosting services that provides content management system included in your control panel and installed by Softalicious or Fantastico. With the use of Softalicious or Fantastico, all you need to do is click on the “install” Wordpress button or link, input your blog/site name, your tag line, desired login name and password and you’re done!

But if you need to install Wordpress manually, here are some steps to do it:
1. Go to Wordpress.com and download the zip file, saved into your computer hardrive.
2. Unzip the file on a different folder.
3. Log in to your hosting account and create a database for your wordpress, you will be asked to configure this code in the wp-config-sample.php found in the Wordpress folder.

4. Open “wp-config-sample.php”, and configure the information/data being asked, it may also ask you to include the path.
5. Rename wp-config-sample.php to “wp-config.php”
6. Once you’re done inputting the codes, you are now ready to upload the files in your server/hosting. You need ftp software for this, an example is FileZilla.
7. Once everything is uploaded in your server/hosting, access your web address, for example http://mysite.com and from there you will be taken to another installation process and you’re done!

I hope my tips have helped anyone who reads it, I will post more as soon as I finish the next extension of this post :)