Installing WordPress

There’s really two ways to install WordPress on your web host. The first way that I’m going to show you is the geeky, techie way which is a little bit confusing. WordPress calls this the famous five-minute install because it’s supposed to take you only about five minutes to do. But if it’s your first time installing WordPress it will probably take you a bit longer than five minutes.

The second way to install WordPress is with a one click install or in the case of WPengine.com it’s automatically installed for you. Many of these web hosts have made it incredibly easy to install WordPress and that’s probably why WordPress powers about 16 to 18% of all the websites in the world. WordPress is amazing and many web posts have made it extremely simple for us to install it and get it running quickly.

So I want to show you the famous five-minute install first because it’ll give you a feel for the power of WordPress. Because I want you to see that this is a powerful content management system. This is not just some webpage that we would’ve thrown together like we did 20 years ago. WordPress is an amazing software for building websites that we’re installing.

The Geeky Install (aka My Favorite)

Okay we’re going to do the famous five minutes install for WordPress we’re going to need some information and some software on our computers so let’s jump right in.

The information we’ll need is: our FTP credentials (file transfer protocol). This includes the server address, the username to get into the server, and the password to log into that server.

Now I say we need an FTP credentials but I want to caution you about using regular FTP. Regular FTP process your username and your password “in the clear”. Basically that’s computer speak to say that the information that is going over the Internet is unsecured. So if somebody was listening to your Internet traffic they could pick up your username and password and your server and they could then hack into your system.  Small businesses need more security than that.

Now I’m warning you about this because I don’t want you to be doing this kind of file with website work at your local Starbucks or another place like that where people could potentially be listening to your Internet traffic. If you’re on your home network you’re much safer then if you’re at your coffee shop.

Small business need a safer and more secure way to transfer files.  This would be SFTP or Secure File Transfer Protocol. Not all web hosts will give you SFTP but the better hosts will and the best hosts will require it. In some cases like Bluehost which I highly recommend us to start our web host you can request an SFTP credentials but it doesn’t come standard with your package.

Okay so you have your server address your FTP or SFTP username and password so you’ve got all the information you need.

Next what you need is an FTP client or a program which can transfer your files. A good free FTP client on the Mac is Cyberduck. I’ll also recommend FileZilla if you’re on Windows. My personal FTP client of choice is called Transmit but it’s a little bit more expensive program, I only mention it because you’ll see me using Transmit in the videos.

The next thing you’ll need is something you’ve already been using it’s your web browser. My web browser of choice is Chrome but you can use Firefox or Safari and if you really have to you can use Internet Explorer.

Okay so that’s all we need so what’s the process of the five-minute install?

Here’s the Famous instructions:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Minute_Install

You can read the famous five minute install instructions but WordPress has actually evolved beyond those instructions so you can do things even simpler than what’s listed in the WordPress codex.

This is my simple 4 step process to install WordPress:
1. Download and unzip the WordPress Zip package
2. Upload the WordPress Files to your server
3. Create a database (and user) on your web server
4. Run the WordPress installation file

I’ll run through the details in the video.

http://sites/hawaiiwp.com/files.youtube.com/watch?v=0l9IUreF8HU

The Simple One-Click Install

Okay now that we’ve installed WordPress the hard way, some would argue the right way, we can now do a one click install of WordPress and there will be cheering noises at how easy it can be.

To do the simple one click install you going to log into your web hosts Control Panel. Sometimes this is called cPanel for short. Then you’re going to find the 1-Click installs sometimes it’s labeled Softalicious or Installer or something like that but basically you’re looking for the WordPress logo. When you find the logo, click on it, follow the directions, fill in the blanks, and you’re done.

Most of the time you can get a more secure install of WordPress by setting up WordPress manually, but One-Click installs are faster easier and they’re very good.

http://sites/hawaiiwp.com/files.youtube.com/watch?v=XHuJpJh2VCw

Congratulations!

Congratulations! You have now completed some of the most technical and geeky part of this whole process. You should probably let out a sigh of relief. From here on out, things to be much simpler and less technical.

From here, we will start learning WordPress. What you have to keep in your mind as we learn WordPress is that WordPress is a software application. Much like Microsoft Excel is a software application which requires a bit of learning before you can use it, become accustomed to it, and finally become proficient at it. There is a learning curve with WordPress. But many functions in WordPress are similar to computer software that you’re already using like Microsoft Word.