WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms om the world. In this lesson we are going to look at Setting up a WordPress blog on your own web host.

Getting WordPress

The first thing you will need to do is  download WordPress. You can do this by going to http://wordpress.org and clicking on 'Download'

Putting WordPress on your host

The next thing you will need to do is upload WordPress to your host. First, extract the WordPress download somewhere where you can access it

Then, log into your web host with FTP and upload the files to your main web folder

(You can learn how to do this in our lesson on uploading your website with FileZilla!)

Get the database details

Before you actually set up WordPress, you will require your database details from your web host. You may have received them in a welcome email, or you may have access to them in your host's control panel. If no database details were provided, but you have access to a database control panel, you may need to add a database and user yourself. If you are not sure, check with your web host's support.

Setting up WordPress

Now for the "world-famous" WordPress five minute install. If you now go to your website (e.g. http://affilorama-example.com) you will be greeted with a message, probably complaining about the lack of a wp-config file. Go ahead and click 'Create a Configuration File'

 Next you will be greeted with the main install screen. Double-check you have all your database details, then click "Let's go!"

In the next screen you must enter the database details. If your Web Host has not specified anything different for 'Database Host', leave it at 'localhost'. Also, unless you know what you are doing, leave 'Table Prefix' as 'wp_'. Once you are sure your database details are correct, click Submit. WordPress will try to connect to the database - if it can't, it will give you an error message. Double-check your database details and try again. If you're 100% sure they're correct, but WordPress still won't connect, contact your web host's support.

The next screen will let you enter some important details regarding your site: the title of your site (don't worry, you can change this later), your main user that you will use to log in to the editing panel of WordPress, your password for this user, and your email address (double-check this: it's very important to get your email right, because that's where it will send the email if you forget your password!).

And that's it! All you have to do now is actually click install!

And that's it! Your install is done! It really was that easy!

Your First WordPress Steps

Now that the install is done, you will be greeted with your admin log in page. From now one, whenever you want to make edits to your WordPress site, you can login to the admin panel at

Use the username and password you set up during the install

From here you will be all set to go in your brand new WordPress install!

Finally, you can preview your main site by clicking on the site title (e.g. "Affilorama Example Site") in the top-left corner:

Happy Blogging!

Lesson Summary

In this lesson we took a look at how to download and set up WordPress on your own web host. The main steps we covered were:

• Getting WordPress
  
• Putting WordPress on your host
• Getting your database details
• Setting up WordPress
• Your first WordPress steps