Step 3. Setting Up Your WordPress Website

If you’ve been following along with this guide, then you’ve already signed up for hosting with HostGator, you’ve registered a domain, and you’ve set up that domain to point to your HostGator hosting account.

What’s next? Let’s make a website! WordPress, here we come.

Log Into CPanel

You could set up a WordPress install the hard way. This means downloading the WordPress files, uploading them through your FTP server, creating a database in phpmyadmin, setting up a configuration file, and finally running the installation script. Sounds a bit technical, doesn’t it?

Thankfully, your HostGator account includes access to QuickInstall – a service that will install a number of popular web development scripts for you without troubling you with the details. To do this, you first need to log into CPanel, the control panel for your HostGator hosting account.

In the initial e-mail HostGator sent you, there should be a link to your CPanel. You can also get there by going to your-domain-name.com/cpanel.

Once you’re logged in, scroll down a bit and press the big WordPress button labeled “Quick Install WordPress for your Site!”

Oh, and don’t worry. That AdSense voucher has been used a long time ago…

Installing WordPress

Once you hit that button, you’ll be taken into the QuickInstall interface. You’ll see a bunch of options down the left side of the screen. Leave them alone, and leave WordPress selected.

In the center of the screen, it should say some stuff about WordPress. Press the “Continue” button.

This should bring you to a screen like the screenshot on the left. After the http://, the dropdown menu should show your domain. In this case, I have a whole bunch of options because I have about ten domains/subdomains on my HostGator account. You shouldn’t see any other options, if you just created a fresh account.

Type your e-mail into the “Admin Email” field. This is the e-mail that WordPress will use to e-mail notifications to and to help you reset your password.

Hit “Install Now.” And wait a moment. You’ll see a green progress bar go across, you’ll see “Congratulations!” and, after about a minute or two… you’re done. WordPress is installed!

Congratulations. Now, let’s log in and get things going. Write down that big long password, too, so you don’t forget it. Don’t worry, we’ll change it in a moment.

Logging into WordPress

WordPress has a front end and a back end. The front end is what average users see. It’s your website, your content.

The back end, the dashboard, is where you go to edit things, publish things, modify things. To get there, start by going to the URL of your website (you can click the link on the QuickInstall page, or type in your domain name). Then, after the last slash, add “wp-admin”. For example, for my test site, I would go to “http://test.digital-photography-howto.com/wp-admin”.

Now log in with your username (admin) and the password that QuickInstall generated for you.

You should end up at a page that looks a whole lot like this…

Installing Your New Theme

The last thing we’ll do for right now is install a new theme. We’ll need to change some settings for the theme later, so we’ll change the WordPress settings at the same time.

In the WordPress dashboard, click on the “Appearance” option on the left-hand menu. This brings up a page where you can manage different themes that you have installed or automatically install new ones.

Click on the “Install Themes” tab up top. There are already a bunch of free themes in the repository that you can search for and install. In our case, we’re going to upload a free theme from Graph Paper Press. So click on the “Upload” option.

Leave that page open for a moment, open a new tab in your browser, and navigate over to Graph Paper Press. Click on the “Themes” up top, and look for the Mansion theme. You could also go straight to the theme download link.

You will have to register to download the theme. If you navigate to the theme manually, you might also be put off by the fact that the button says “Buy Now.” Don’t worry… it’s free! Really! No lie!

When you click the signup or buy now button, you’ll see a page like this. Just choose the “Freebies” account, and it’s free. No credit card or anything required. You’ll get access to Mansion and several other free themes. Once you’ve signed up, download the .zip file for the Mansion theme.

Finally, go back to the WordPress tab. We left it open under Appearance -> Install Themes -> Upload. Click “Choose File” and find the zip file. Then, click upload.

If everything went according to plan, you’ll see a page like this. Click “Activate,” and you’re new blog theme is now active…!

Next step? We go into the dashboard and customize some settings. Then, we’ll work on uploading some pictures, so we’ve actually got a website…