How to Make Your Own Website With WordPress
Learning how to make your own website can be scary. Lots of people let this fear keep them from getting online. The thing is, learning how to make your own website isn’t all that difficult with the tools that are available today. I find that WordPress is the easiest platform to work with when developing a website that will get your message out to the masses. WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform. It excels at being a blogging platform but can also be used as a CMS (content management system). This article will look at WordPress and how to get it installed and set-up.
There are two things that need to be dealt with before you can start the installation of WordPress. You need to purchase a URL and you need to figure out where to obtain hosting. The URL should be chosen so that it contains your keyword phrase. I have a discussion on Keywords at my site Insights into Internet Marketing (follow the link at the bottom of this article). When your keywords are identified and you have purchased a URL, the next issue is hosting. Hosting is a place where your website files are stored. There are many hosting companies to choose. I personally use Hostgator as it has an inexpensive package that allows for unlimited sites.
With those two items out of the way, you can start figuring out how to make your own website. Login to the cPanel of your hosting account and navigate down to Software/Services. Here you will find a selection that says Fantastico DeLux. This is a script installation product. Open Fantastico and select WordPress from the check boxes on the left side of the screen. Click on WordPress and follow the instructions that come up. It’s that simple. When you have finished the installation, log out of the cPanel and login to your new website. This is done by typing in your URL followed by /wp-admin. Then enter your user name and password.
There are many ways to configure WordPress but the most pressing needs for how to make your own website look like you want are the themes and title of the site. When you have logged in, you will see a menu down the left side of the page. Scroll down to the Appearance tab and open it. Click on Themes in the menu that opens.
You will be taken to the Theme pages. Click install themes and spend as much time as you need to choose one of the 100’s of available free themes. If you like the theme but aren’t too thrilled about the picture in the header, don’t worry this can be changed to fit your taste. The title is changed by selecting the menu item Settings and going to the General tab. Here you can put the name of your site, and adjust the header text to read like you wish.
