One of the biggest concerns most individuals not familiar with web servers, databases and Content Management Systems is the learning, training and frustration when installing software.
Fortunately, when you host with a qualified and supportive provider (read the last Building an Artificially Intelligent Website segment here), you can be literally minutes away from a stress free install experience.
Most hosting providers (at least Linux webservers) provide an administration interface called cPanel to handle your email, ftp, subdomain and other services setup needs.
If you look ‘down’ the list, you will find an option to click on a button called “Fantastico”. Upon clicking this link, you will be giving a practical Christmas list of Open Source options to install for your company.
One of those options will (or should) be WordPress.
From this interface, you will be just a few answers away from installing WordPress for your company.
There are a few items to consider which could trip you up, however; they are not esoteric requests which confuse easily.
The first item to consider is what domain you are going to connect this WordPress install with.
Typically, you will be given a selection of domains and subdomains you have created for your company with cPanel at this point. Every one of these choices have already been associated with a folder on your server (or should have been).
You have the option of creating the installation in the main directory for the domain / subdomain choice (by leaving the next option blank) or selecting a subdirectory (new or existing).
For most clients, their main directory is where WordPress is installed. However; for example, one of my clients has an existing website in their main directory and wanted the new features of a blog. Here, I created a new folder to install WordPress into, and pointed the subdomain “blog.WebsiteName.com” to this folder.
Once you are past these two selections, the next five have to do with giving your website a name, a tagline, an admin username and admin password and where you want to send the setup email (I highly recommend you do this). At a minimum, write down the username and password you just created!
Sit back for the 5-10 seconds that the script takes to setup WordPress and you are done. Total time for most installs I do this way takes less than 1 minute. Plan on maybe 3-5 minutes for your first time.
If you make a mistake (for instance, installing in a wrong directory), Fantastico allow to you to easily delete the installation and start fresh.
So, with the right services provided with your hosting solution, your installation experience can be overcome without having to learn a new profession.
Now, with a hosting provider selected, a content management system selected and installed, next segment we discuss your first planning step.