Okay, now that you have your domain, and your webspace, your domain is pointed to you web host’s nameservers, you are ready to start setting up your site.
You will need some ftp software. This is what you will use to upload files to your new site. I recommend Filezilla. It’s free and works great. You can get it at http://filezilla-project.org. Download Filezilla and install it.
Now you can point set up Filezilla with a conection to your new site.
1. Run Filezilla.
2. Select Site Manager under the File menu.
3. Click New Site.
4. In the Host box, enter your new domain (ie MyDomain.com).
5. Select Normal in the Logontype dropdown.
6. Enter your username in the User box.
7. Enter your password in the Password box.
8. In the list on the left, change “New Site” to whatever the name of your site is.
9. Click OK.
Now you need to download the WordPress blog software (it’s free too). Download it at http://wordpress.org. You can find instructions for installing WordPress here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.
After you get WordPress installed, you might want some plugins. WordPress plugins are easy to install. Just download them, unzip them, and ftp them to your web server, placing them in the wp-content/plugins directory. After they are uploaded, login to your wordpress blog, select Plugins from the menu, located the plugin(s) you uploaded, and click activate. You can download the plugins here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.
The plugins I use are:
1. Akismet (antispam)
2. Crawlpage
3. Google XML Sitemaps
4. WordPress Database Backup
5. Wp-Shortstat
One setting in WordPress that I recommend highly that you use is the Permalink.
1. Login to your Worpress blog.
2. Click Settings in the menu.
3. Click Permalinks.
4. Check Custom Structure.
5. Enter “/%postname%.html” into the Custom Structure box (without the quotes).
6. Click Save Changes.
If you get an a message saying something like “You should update your .htaccess now.”, ftp into your site, and temporarily change the permissions of the root directory to 777. Then go back save your changes again. You want it to write a .htaccess file into the root directory. Once it creates the file, set the permissions of the root directory back to maybe 715.
