Creating a Website

Building your own website or Blog on WordPress.

Getting Started

 

A lot of friends have asked me about how to build their own personal website/blog so here are some quick notes to explain how I built mine. There is a lot of information out there, so I am just going to give you a quick guide as to the steps I took to create the site you are looking at. I suggest you consult google search to answer any questions you might have or for further clarification. I used a wordpress template, mine is a template I paid for on themeforest,  but there are many other free templates within the wordpress site, that you can change as often as you like. This is not a comprehensive guide, just the steps I took to get this site up and running. It might be a bit difficult to follow if you are a total beginner, it is probably more useful as a refresher, for tips, or if you are just curious. My main goal of putting this here is a reference for myself, and to help a couple of my friends… but if anyone else is stuck, hope this helps. I will extend this posting, but for now it is more of a sketch.

Part 1- Your domain name and hosting

1. I bought my domain name at godaddy.com

2 I signed up for website hosting at hostgator.com

3. I logged into my account at godaddy.com, pressed the LAUNCH button at domains, clicked on www.deirdrehayesphotography.com,  clicked on set set “nameservers” and relaced  my specific namerservers in Nameserver 1 and nameserver 2, which I got from my hostgator account when I signed up.

4. Then I logged into my Hostgator control panel and clicked “addon domains” in the “Domains” section. The first welcome email you get will tell you how to get into your control panel.

5.I added my domain name “deirdrehayesphotography.com” and it automatically filled in the next 2 boxes. I then added my password. and clicked “addon domain”.

Part 2 -Adding your site to WordPress

6. I clicked back on the homepage of the hostgator control panel, and this time under “Software/Services”, I clicked “Fantastico De lux”

On the left sidebar under “blogs” I clicked ‘WordPress’, which brought up the WordPress section on the same window.

installing your wordpress blog

 

 

I then clicked “New Installation” which brought up the “Installation location”, where I chose my website name “deirdrehayesphotography.com” on the pull down menu.installing your wordpress blog

Under access data, I chose my username and password, (which will always be used to log into my site via wordpress). I chose  my “nickname” and checked my email and site name. I pressed “Install WordPress” and then “finish installation”

Part 3- Setting up your Site with WordPress

7.  Then I was ready to set up my site in wordpress. I went to my domain name followed by /wp-admin (i.e www.deirdrehayesphotography/wp-admin) and entered the username and password that I just chose.   That brought me to the area where I  control the design and content of my site.

How to set permalinks

8. The first thing I did  in wordpress was to go to “Settings”, then “Permalinks”, I chose custom structure and wrote in /%category%/%postname%/ and then saved the changes. That gives your  pages names instead of numbers which is better for google search engines.

9. Next I activated the plugin Akismet, found under the plugins menu and I entered my API key. ( This keeps spam away from your site). You have to sign up with Akismet to get an API key. There should be a link there.
add new plugin
search plugins

 

wp-policies

10. Under “Add new Plugin”, I did a search for “WP Policies” and installed and activated that plugin ( this is the legal jargon to add to the bottom of your site). Under “settings” there is now a “WP Policy” section. I clicked on that, checked the info and clicked “import files”.  I checked that I want all the policy disclaimers and then pressed import files.

theme editorfooter editorAbove the policy section there is a <?php static_footer_pages(); ?> . I coped and pasted that and put it in my footer. The footer  is found in appearance ->editor -> footer.php. And then I pasted that at the bottom of code, directly above the </body> tag.

 Part 4 – Designing your site.

11. Next I  chose my template. There are hundreds of templates to choose from. Some are easier to navigate than others, so I only really considered the templates with 4 or 5 stars. They all give you different options, and layouts.

 

I’ll cover design in Part 2, coming soon…

 

 

If you just want something simple, then tumblr.com is as easy to set up and use as facebook or google+. You can check out my tumblr at deirdrehayes.tumblr.com. The advantage of using wordpress is that you can use an affiliate program like http://www.viglink.com through which you can monetize your site.

 

 

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