After the last post, you now have a fabulous domain name registered, and space for your website to be hosted. Now, all you need is something to fill the space!

In today’s post, I’ll take you through installing WordPress on your site. Although WordPress started out life as blogging software, you can now use it as a content management system for a traditional looking website (with or without a blog attached!). The great thing about WordPress is that it’s very flexible. Even more great – it’s free!

1. After registering your domain name and signing up for a web hosting account, you’ll receive an email from Hostgator to confirm your order and give you all the technical details for your site. It will look something like this (although, of course, you’ll have actual information in place of the smudges!):

   

   As the email states, if you followed the process in my previous post and purchased your domain from Hostgator at the same time as your hosting, you’ll be able to use the links in the email to access your domain immediately. If you purchased your domain elsewhere, you’ll need to let your domain registrar know what your Hostgator nameservers are (they’re contained in the welcome email from Hostgator) – you’ll probably be able to do this yourself by logging into your account with your domain registrar and entering the information in the appropriate place.

   To access your site’s control panel (cpanel), click on the link in the email that says “Until your DNS has been changed and resolves to our nameservers, you can access your cpanel at…”.

2. When asked for your username and password, enter those that you chose when you signed up with Hostgator.

   

3. Scroll down towards the bottom of your Hostgator control panel, to the section called Software/Services.

   
   

   Click on the very happy looking Fantastico De Luxe. Despite its corny sounding name, Fantastico De Luxe is a wonderful way to install a range of software with one click. In this case, we’re going to be using it to install WordPress on your site.

4. Click on the WordPress link in the menu on the left hand side of the page. This will result in the following screen – click on New installation.

   

5. Choose the name of the domain on which you want to install WordPress. If this is your first site, there will be only one choice here in the drop-down menu.

   

6. Leave the option Install in directory blank. This is because you will be installing WordPress as a content management system, i.e. to manage the content of your whole site (pages and a blog, if you decide to have one). You would choose to install WordPress in a directory if, for example, you already had a site designed in HTML and CSS, and wanted to add a blog to it – in this case, WordPress would be used purely as blogging software on one part of your site only and not as a content management system.
7. Choose a username and password to use to access your WordPress administration area. If you use WordPress as a content management system, you do not have to go via your Hostgator cpanel to edit your site. Instead, you’ll do this via your WordPress dashboard, which you’ll be able to access at www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin.
8. Leave Admin nickname blank.
9. Enter the email address that you want to use to receive WordPress notifications, e.g. when people comment on your blog.
10. Enter a name and description (tagline) for your site. Don’t worry if you’re not yet 100% sure of this – you will be able to change these settings in your WordPress admin area at any time.
11. Lastly, click the Install WordPress button. The following screens will ask you to confirm and finish the installation, and give you the option to email the details of the installation to yourself.

Voila! You have installed WordPress!

You can view your site by either going to your domain name (i.e. www.yoursitename.com) or by using the link in the Hostgator welcome email if your nameservers haven’t yet resolved (if you go to your domain name and there’s nothing there yet, then the nameservers haven’t resolved and you’ll need to use the link Hostgator gave you). It can take nameservers anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours to resolve, so you may need a bit of patience here

When you view your site, you’ll notice that it doesn’t look so pretty yet. Next time, we’ll take a look at how to install a WordPress theme and start adding content to your site.