Setup your blog/website in minutes: Install WordPress

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WordPress is a free and open source blog publishing application and content management system. We can build a website and take it live in a matter of minutes. WordPress has made all the process so easy. Its simple interface and huge developer community adds to its beauty.

Both automatic and manual installation methods has been explained in this post. You can directly scroll down and follow the one that suits your requirement.

Many people have asked me about setting up a blog. They think that, they do not have any programing knowledge, so they can’t build and maintain a blog. That was right some years ago, but with WordPress its all made easy, to setup and maintain. I think, having just a bit of common sense is enough to setup and maintain a website/blog, that is powered by WordPress.

Many newbies get confused with wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

WordPress.org: is a place where you can download latest version of the software and install it on to your server (read on to know how to install it). So at first place, you must have purchased a web hosting account with FTP, database access or cpanel with Fantastico [Don’t worry of these terms now, you can contact us for any suggestion on choosing a hosting provider].
We recommend using Doreo Host, for its reliability and customers care.

WordPress.com: However easy-to-use is the open source package, there is still a barrier in that, it requires a hosting account, a database, FTP, etc making normal people like you and me dizzy. To bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience Automattic (company which owns WordPress.com) created WordPress.com, a hosted version of the open source package where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge.
But the main dis-advantage for many people is that, you will not get a personal URL. You need to compromise with the http://www.yourwebsitename.wordpress.com and you can not put ads on your hosted blog/website. And more importantly, you can not get 100% control over your blog/website.

Using the open source WordPress software, you can create a static as well as dynamic website using WordPress. We have seen college websites, company sites, government websites to popular blogs built using WordPress.

There is yet another WordPress software called WordPressMU, for multi-author blogs and we will talk about it in some other posts.

So self hosted WordPress is the way to go. And we are here to help you with the installation process.

So here is how you install WordPress:

Automatic Installation of WordPress, through cpanel of your web-hosting a/c

I. Fantastico: If you have cpanel, log into it. And see the Software/services section, for Fantastico De Luxe or simply Fantastico. Click on it.

Next see for the link to WordPress installation in the sidebar, click on it.

Click on the New Installation.

Install in directory, Leave empty to install in the root directory of the domain
(access example: http://yourdomainname.com).
Enter only the directory name to install in a directory
(for http://yourdomainname.com/foldername Enter flodername only in the install in directory field). This directory SHOULD NOT exist, it will be automatically created.

Click on Install WordPress, to get the details of the automatically created database. And the directory where you have chosen to install WordPress. We recommend you to install your blog in the root, if you’re main focus is on the blog.

Notedown the username and the password for logging into your WordPress admin area. You can even save this details in your email.

If you have installed WordPress in the root directory, then your blog will be accessible at http://yourblogurl.com or if you have installed it in a folder by name blog, then your blog is accessible at http://yourblogurl.com/blog. You can log into your WordPress admin area at http://yourblogurl.com/wp-admin or http://yourblogurl.com/blog/wp-admin depending upon your installation.

Manual installation of WordPress:

II. Through FTP:
1. Download and unzip the latest WordPress package, if you haven’t already.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
Log into your cpanel (Ex: http://yoursitename.com/cpanel ) and click on the “MySql Wizard” in Databases section.

Enter any name for your new database:

Create a new user for the database. Chose a strong password.

Now assign all the privileges to the newly created user. Click on ALL PRIVILEGES. Note down the username and the database name provided at this point.

That’s it, your new database is ready.

3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php, in the downloaded WordPress package.

4. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details that you noted down while creating the database(in step 2).

Replace the underlined info with your database name, database user name and database password(that you previously noted down).
Leave the ‘localhost’ as it is. Most of the time, it will be localhost itself.

5. Go to https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ to generate secret-key. Now replace the “Put Your Unique Phrase Here” in the wp-config.php with the one generated at
https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ (Each time your installation fails or you want to reinstall, you need to generate new secret key).

6. Save wp-config.php and upload all the unzipped WordPress files to either root directory or the directory of your choice.

7. Now open your web browser, and visit http://yourwebsitename.com/wp-admin/install.php (if installed in root directory) or http://yourwebsitename.com/foldername/wp-admin/install.php (if installed in foldername folder).

8. Follow the simple steps, enter your blog name, URL and email ID etc and complete the installation.

9. Log into http://yourwebsitename.com/wp-admin/ or http://example.com/foldername/wp-admin/ for your WordPress admin area.

10. You are done! Congrats. Play around for some time or some days to get used to WordPress. You may feel uncomfortable in the beginning, but it will be walk in the breeze experience, after you are used to it.

III. You can always send a support ticket to your hosting company and most of the time, they can help you with this.

IV. We can help you install it.

If you do not have cpanel and hence fantastico and you even do not have the FTP with your hosting account, then you must think of moving your website or blog to some other good web hosting provider.