WordPress For Noobs – Part 1: Installing WordPress

Welcome everyone to my brand new tutorial about WordPress. In this first tutorial, I will guide you thru the installation of WordPress, which is dead simple. It is known as the “5 minute install”, though it takes even less if you know a few things.

1. The first thing we need to do is download WordPress from WordPress.org. Save it to somewhere you can easily get to it, like the Desktop.

2. Depending on what programs you have installed for unzipping or decompressing files, a dialog box will come up. Extract the contents of the download to your desktop or elsewhere where you can find it.

3. The next we need to do is to create a database on our web host. There are a million different ways this is done, this screenshot is from my web host. Generally you also want to create a brand new user for WordPress, that way if someone hacks into another one of your databases, they can’t hack into ALL your databases. Feel free to contact me if you need help with this step. Make sure you save this information somewhere safe! We will need it to finish the installation, and then keep it somewhere safe after that.

4. Inside of the decompressed WordPress folder you will find a file called wp-config-sample.php. Open this file in a text editor. We need to change this configuration info to match up with our database name. Use the database name you create, the username, etc.

5. We then need to upload this to our web host using FTP. If you are not familiar with FTP, contact me and I can fill you in. The one thing to keep in mind is how you want your site set up. If you want http://www.domainname.com/blog, you would rename the WordPress folder the files are in to blog and then upload that folder to the site root. If you wanted the blog to appear at http://www.domainname.com/, you would just upload the files themselves, not the directory.

6. Go to http://www.domainname.com/wp-admin/install.php (or domainname.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php, whatever you chose). Fill in any information asked for (it should just ask for what you want the administrator information to be), and click the button.

7. If all went well, WordPress is installed! If not, it will give you an applicable error message. Either search Google for the error message (remember, Google is your friend) or come back here for help! Also, see the official instructions at WordPress.org.

Stay tuned for basic setup tips in the next tutorial!