How To Make Your Own Website: Wordpress Installation
This is the fourth post in the series on How to Make your Own Website.
In the first step, we looked at the importance of choosing the right domain name.
In the second post of this series, we looked at how important it is to find a quality web host.
In the third post of this series, we looked at why your website should be a blog.
Now, we’re going to cover basic installation of your Wordpress blog.
I stated in the second post that there are only TWO web hosts I can recommend from personal experience that offer the Fantastico Cpanel for blog installation.
To install Wordpress, you merely log into your cpanel with the address provided in your activation letter.
In the Cpanel, you’ll see an option for Fantastico Control Panel. That’s where you want to go. The Fantastico Control Panel offers you one click installation of Wordpress.
Now, once you’ve installed Wordpress, you’ll need to do a few simple “tweaks” to make your wordpress blog even better.
FIRST: Log into your Administration Panel
SECOND: Click on Settings. Under “General” change the time to your local time.
THIRD: This is the most important “tweak” you can make to Wordpress.
Click on the PERMALINKS like under Settings.
The “default” setting is not the most SEO friendly setting available.
By default your Wordpress posts will be displayed like this:
http://keystowebsitesuccess.com/?p=123
You’ll lose out on a significant amount of Search Engine Mo-Jo by leaving this setting with the default value.
If changing this makes you nervous, then choose the option:
http://keystowebsitesuccess.com/2008/07/sample-post/
If you’re feeling brave, there are two other “advanced” options you can use:
- Click “Custom Structure” and paste in the following: /%postname%/
- Click “Custom Structure” and paste in the following: /%category%/%postname%/
The first option makes the permalink of your posts appear like this:
http://keystowebsitesuccess.com/sample-post/
The second option makes the permalink of your post appear like this:
http://keystowebsitesuccess.com/category/sample-post/
Both of these are far superior to the ?p=123 name for posts.
See, when the search engines index your blog post, the name of the post plays a role in your ranking. By changing this value to http://keystowebsitesuccess.com/sample-post/, the title of the blog post can do it's job to help your post get good SERPS.
In order to make this “stick”, you’ll have to change the permission the htaccess file to 666.
If working with an FTP program or doing a chmod to change a file permission gives you the willies, then be forewarned, it’s not going to get any better from here on out.
Acumen Webservices will take care of all of this type of work so you can get down to creating blog posts and blog pages.
While you’re in there, upload and chmod your robots.txt file to 666 as well.
It’s at this point I also upload essential plug ins. More about that next!
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