One of the greatest gifts that Open Source programmers have given to the world is Wordpress. I use it for my blog and various other sites.

Spend the next 10 minutes reading this article and you will be able to setup a nice small business website with your own content and a few other nice touches for free, zip, zilch, zip, nada.

I love it, having used both typepad, moveable type and blogger, Wordpress beats them all.

My belief is that Wordpress is about to come of age for Small Business Websites. The product is so easy to use and the thing that I like is that you can set it up in 3-4 hours and you can customise it without needing to be a programmer.

Most Small Businesses don’t have a big budget for their websites. Approximate zero in many cases. Even with a decent budget its difficult to get a designer who can afford to actually put the time in to create a custom design for you.

The issue with this is that you then end up getting the designer to update the site everytime you want to add some news or updates.

Why Wordpress?

• You can get it setup on thousands of Hosting Servers around the world with the press of a button.
• Its Free
• There are thousands of developers writing plugins and themes for it
• You can do just about anything a small business is going to want to do with their site using it or its plug ins.
• It is so easy to use once you have it installed and you will keep updating your site and adding new information to it.
• Its SEO optimised by default

What are the Steps?

1. You need a domain name (skip this if you have one). My favorite in both Australia is Intaserve.com and Internationally is Godaddy.com. Dont however use Godaddy for shared hosting as they don’t have the setup you will need to finish the rest of this setup. (if you need a Virtual Private Server they are suitable)
2. You need to get a hosting provider that uses a product called CPanel and Fantastico. Cpanel is to linux web hosting what windows was to DOS. Cpanel basically puts a gui front end on the linux backend and makes it easy for non techos to get a hosting solution setup quickly.
3. Fantastico is simply an add-on to CPanel that makes setup and installation of a range of software including Wordpress.
4. Here are two Webhosters that are suitable they both offer Cpanel and Fantastico but make sure that you sign up to a plan that has this listed, if you have any doubts ask their support. US based readers use Dotster . Autralian readers can use Web Hosts Australia (it is important where you place your hosting, if you want Australian Search traffic, host it in Australia, likewise US and UK)
5. Ok once you have signed up for their hosting. you need to delegate your domain. To do this, do the following steps
6. Check your signup email from your new hosting company, it will
   have many technical looking details, the ones you need are listed as
   DNS ie dns1.yourhostingcompany.com and dns2.yourhostingcompany.com note
   these details down.
7. Go to your Domain Registrar (ie Godaddy or whoever you purchased
   the domain from, if its old and you cant remember who you purchased it
   from you will need to do a lookup at www.dnsstuff.com and put your
   domain name into the whois box and then find your registrar details. If you cant find your password, contact them, they usually have a form to fill out (I call it the dumb guy form, named after me for having done it a few times).
8. Once you have managed to get into your Domain Registrar’s system you need to find the
   section known as “Manage your domain”.
9. In this area there will be a section called NameServers. They will probably have existing name servers in place.
10. NOTE: If you have an existing site and you are not ready to change this yet you will need to create a temporary staging or development site ie dev.yourdomain.com before you change your name server settings (this is a bit more difficult and if you need help on this drop me an email mike@searchcorp.biz)
11. So, change the name server information to your domain name servers provided by your new hosting company (this is done on the Domain Management section in your Registrars control panel)
12. This will normally take 12-24 hours to propagate around the Domain Name infrastructure.
13. Login into your new Hosting Companies control panel (there will be a link with your introduction email)
14. You will see an Icon called Fantistico right down the bottom, click this
15. This will open a list of 30 or so software names. Find Wordpress and click it.
16. This will ask if you if you want to install Wordpress, obviously you do
17. You will need to enter the user names and passwords etc just follow their screen
18. Just a hint, when you create the new wordpress account, make sure you say yes to email you the details. Its very handy next time you forget your password or user name to find this in your email.
19. So, select install Wordpress and follow the prompts.
20. It will give you an option to view the new site, you will see a very basic site with a Hello World post on it.
21. A few Wordpress concepts you need to come to grips with
    1. Post. This is new article, news, content piece created each time you decide to write something new. This how to guide on wordpress is a Post
    2. Categories or Tags. Each Post will normally put into one or more Categories or Tags (see my side bar, I have lots of different categories depending on what I am writing about)
    3. Page is slightly different, its created in a similar way but appears in a page menu normally at the top of the site, it really probably should be called Static Page you use this for items that you want to appear in the menus all the time on every page (you can see I have one called Mikes Services)
    4. Wordpress Control Panel. This is what you see when you login into the back end of wordpress, you can find it at www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin.php . This is where all the Wordpress magic happens,including.
       1. Create new pages and posts,
       2. Change the look and feel of the website by changing the themes
       3. Add new functionality by adding new Plugins
       4. Manage your comments by readers
       5. Add links to other sites and so on
    5. Themes. Themes are like new designs or templates that you install and can change to present different designs or layouts to customise and present a suitable design for your business. There are thousands of these designs and you will find one that suits your business.
    6. Plugins. These are additional software that you upload to the plugin directory that give you extra functionality on top of the standard Wordpress capabilities such as Ecommerce, Spam filtering, photo uploads, Adsense, there are hundreds of them.
       
22. Ok, so I would encourage you to login in and have a look at the backend. Write a new post or page and then click the view site link and see what happens, just call it Test of wordpress (you can delete it pretty quickly, being able to add/change and delete content in minutes is one of the really cool things about Wordpress) The menus are pretty self explanatory

So you now should have a site running. But it aint that pretty. So what now?

Read the next part of this series. Customizing Wordpress