CPanel and Installing Wordpress

Next, let’s have a look at your host’s control panel. To see the control panel, simply enter “http://cpanel.shologoo.co.uk”.

You will be prompted for your username and password. You got this information in your Shologoo confirmation mail, so enter username and password and confirm to get to the cpanel.

Now that you’ve logged in, you’ll be looking at a whole lot of menu options. Don’t worry, though, you’ll never use most of them (at least not on a regular basis).

There are many ways to create a website. Now that you have a domain and hosting for it, you can create and publish any kind of website you want.

WordPress, the service we’ll be using is my favourite tool for creating and managing websites. It’s certainly not the only option available, but here are the reasons why I personally use it:

1. It’s completely free to use.
2. It’s incredibly flexible.
3. It’s very easy to use.

Wordpress lets you set up a site, customize it and fill it with content very quickly and easily. Even if you have absolutely no programming skills (like me), you can still make great, professional looking websites with Wordpress.

Installing WordPress
In your cpanel, scroll down until you see the menu named “Software / Services”. Click on the “Softaculous ” icon.
 
On the Softaculous  home screen, click on the “Wordpress” link in the left hand menu. Then, select “New Installation”.  
This will bring you to a form to fill in some preliminary data for the installation.

 Leave the “Install in directory” field blank. This way, Wordpress will be installed on the root of your domain and not a subfolder (i.e. www.thisnewdomain.net instead of www.thisnewdomain.net/blog) 
 Enter an administrator username other than “Admin”.  Admin is the most frequently used administrator username and therefore the one most often targeted by hackers. 

 Enter a real password, like the one in the example above. Mix uppercase and lowercase letter with numbers. Don’t use complete words, birth dates or anything else that isn’t random.

 You can do whatever you want with the “Base configuration” fields. Nicknames, e-mail address and site name and tagline can be changed any time from within Wordpress, so you don’t need to worry about these yet.

With the form filled out, hit the “Install Wordpress” button.

The next screen includes some info about the directories that will be used for the installation. Click the “Finish installation” button to – you guessed it – finish the installation.

Congratulations! You now have a website online! Admittedly, there’s not much there yet, but it is a real website and you can go visit it already. Type your URL into your browser (e.g. http://www.thisnewdomain.net) and you’ll see a simple white and blue website and a small entry titled “Hello World!”

This is the standard Wordpress theme. You can easily replace this with one of thousands of free Wordpress themes. You can completely transform the look and feel of your website and we’ll see how to do this in the next chapter.

First, however, we’ll get some basic settings done.
To edit your website, append “/wp-admin” to your URL, like so: 
http://www.thisnewdomain.net/wp-admin
Enter the username and password you set in the Softaculous  installation to log in.

The home screen informs you about your current stats, new comments and more. The menu on the left links to all of the settings pages that allow you to change almost every aspect of your website.

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WordPress Setup

Security
First, we’ll take some security measures. As it is, Wordpress is quite vulnerable to hacks and exploits and we’re going to change that.

Before we work on the website itself, here’s an important cautionary notice:  
Offline Security
Your PC must be kept clean! Make sure that you have a virus scanner installed, running regular scans (click here to download a free Windows antivirus program, if you don’t have one yet). You should also have a good firewall to protect your connections to and from networks (click here for a free Windows firewall).
Why is this important? You will be connecting to your website and uploading data to it. If you have malicious software on your computer, you can infect your website with it which can lead to your site getting hacked or just “breaking”, i.e. files being modified in such a way that the site isn’t accessible anymore.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often, but believe me, when it does, it’s a real pain!

Block spam comments
Just like you can get spam-mail in your inbox and need some filter to protect against this, you can get tons of spam comments to your blog. A good spam filter is available and already installed, but it also comes with a drawback or two. Let me explain what it’s all about and also show you an alternative.
Go to the “Plugins” menu by clicking here: 
This takes you to the list of installed plugins. You’ll see two already listed, “Hello Dolly” and “Akismet”. Akismet is your spam filter. Click on “Activate”. 
Now, you’ll see a yellow bar across the top of the page stating that you need to enter your Wordpress.com API key for Akismet to work. You can then go to the Akismet website to sign up for a key and here’s where you’ll see the “problem” with Akismet.
 
Akismet can be free for personal use. They still ask you to make a contribution, but you can choose not to pay anything. For business use, you need to pay.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Akismet asking for money, in return for their highly valuable service. If you’re on a really tight budget, paying for spam filtering might just not be an option for you, though and I can understand that as well.

So, at this point you can decide to either sign up for Akismet, get you key and then activate it in WordPress (follow the on-screen instructions for this), or use a free alternative.

You can easily find free anti-spam plugins but in my experience, they tend not to work very well. A free option that works flawlessly is to use Facebook comments on your site.

You can install this plugin to get the job done. The easiest way to install the plugin is to go to the plugins menu, click on “Add New” and then search for “Facebook Comments” in the search field.

From the results, you can choose to install a plugin directly, without having to download anything.
There are, unfortunately, also two downsides to using Facebook comments. The first is that you are excluding a certain amount of people from ever commenting on your site. Some people simply don’t use Facebook or don’t want to use their FB account on external website.

On the other hand, replacing the existing comments with Facebook comments can be a bit tricky and it really depends on what theme you use. I can’t possibly cover all options for all themes in this guide.

Plugins
Next, we’ll see how you can customize your website by installing plugins. Click on the “Plugins” menu item in the left menu and then click on “Add New”. 
On the screen that opens, you can search for plugins. You can use it like a search engine to look for plugins that do some specific thing you are looking for. For now, we’re going to go for some very specific plugins to increase your website’s security.
Type “wordpress firewall” into the search field. 
Click on “Search Plugins” and you should see the right plugin as the first entry in the results.
Click on the “Install” link on the left hand side and then on the “Install Now” button on the screen that opens to start the automatic installation. The installation is usually very quick. Once it’s done, click on “Activate Plugin”.

We will use this exact same process to install a few more plugins that are essential to keeping your website safe from hacking attempts and also to do some search engine optimization.

Here is the list of plugins that you should install by entering each one of the names into the plugin search-field and then installing and activating them:

 Login Lockdown  WP-DBmanager  WordPress SEO by Yoast  smush.it

Login Lockdown and smush.it are very simple and only need to be installed and activated. Login lockdown prevents brute force attempts of hacking into your WordPress admin account. Smush.it automatically and losslessly compresses all images that you upload, which makes your pages load faster. If you want to learn more about improving your page loading times, there’s an extensive guide here.
We’ll get back to the WordPress SEO plugin later on. 
WP-DBmanager Database Backup
When you install the WP-DBmanager plugin, you’ll see a warning message appear in your dashboard and it will ask you to move a file. For now, don’t worry about that. We will take care of this file just a bit further on in the guide.
The database is where all the content information of your blog is stored (posts, pages, comments, etc.). It’s very important to do regular backups of your database, since this is what you will be falling back on if anything ever goes wrong with your blog or you accidentally delete something important.
Open the “Database” tab in your WordPress admin panel:
 
First, go to the “DB Options” highlighted above. Here, you can set up automatic backups to be mailed to your inbox. 
Simply enter the e-mail address you want the backup files sent to and set an interval for the backups. Set this according to how often you intend to post. I would set it to at least once a week and if you will be posting more than three times a week, set it to backup daily.
You can simply clean out all the backup files once a month and only keep the newest one in your inbox.
Sometimes, the automatic backups don’t work for me. I have no idea why, but on some of my sites, this feature works and on others, it doesn’t. In the latter case, I simply do a manual backup after each new post. It’s very easy to do: In the “Database” menu, select “Backup DB” and then click on the “Backup” button in the middle of the screen. This saves the backup file to your server, from where you can periodically download the newest one to your hard-disk (you’ll see how to do this later on in the guide).

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Design - Selecting A Theme.

Selecting a Theme for Your Website
There’s almost no limit to the variety in designs and functionality that a WordPress website can have. It’s a completely flexible platform and there are more different visual styles (themes) for WordPress available than you could see in your lifetime.
The biggest problem with picking a theme is the sheer amount of them on offer. It’s a complete overload and you could easily spend days just browsing different options.
In this chapter, I want to show you how and where you can find a great theme for your site and give you some pointers on what you should be aware of when choosing one.
Where to Find Themes
One simple option is to browse for them right from within your admin panel. In the right sidebar, click on the “Appearance” tab. From there, you can select “Add New Themes” to start browsing a vast selection of them. 

Just to give this a try, tick two of the options on the search page. For example: “Right Sidebar” and your favourite colour. Then, click on “Find Themes”.  
You’ll see a wide range of choices being presented.
You can click on the “Prevew” link for any of the themes to get an idea of what the theme would look like in action.
To install a theme on your blog, simply click on the “Install” link in the theme description and then click on the “Install Now” button in the window that opens. This will initiate an automatic installation, after which you can choose to preview the theme, return to the themes menu or activate the theme right away.

You can install as many themes as you like and switch between them through the “Appearance” -> “Themes” menu in the sidebar of your WordPress admin panel. 
How to Pick a Good Theme
There are millions of themes to pick from, but how do you find a winner? Here are the most important criteria to look out for:

Subjective Impression This is a big one, obviously. The theme needs to appeal to you personally. No matter how good the features of a theme are, if you don’t like it’s looks, you’ll never be completely happy with your blog. 
 Uncluttered Look for themes that aren’t overloaded with stuff. Generally, one content area and one sidebar is a good guideline to go for. Multiple sidebars and too many widget-areas tend to make a blog look messy and disorganized. When it comes to design, I always use “less is more” as a guideline. 
 Loading Speed This is extremely important. Take notice of the loading speed of the theme’s demo site and also test the loading speed once you’ve installed the theme on your site and added your plugins. People’s attention spans are getting shorter every day and if your pages take 10 seconds to load, you’ll probably lose half your visitors before
 P a g
your content even shows up. 
 Last Updated/Support/Comments Check to see when the theme was last updated, whether there are positive or negative comments about it and whether there’s any possibility of getting support. Be cautious of themes that haven’t seen updates in a long time. 
If you start Googling for WordPress themes, you’ll quickly come across so-called “Premium” themes, which come at a certain price. Some sites offer custom-built themes, others offer highly customizable themes (i.e. where you do the customizing yourself) and others again offer ready- made, but non-customizable themes.
Free themes are generally fine to start out with, although they do come with a few drawbacks. A common issue with free themes is a lack of maintenance. Often, there’s no one actively working to keep a free theme up-to-date with the latest WordPress version, keeping it compatible with various plugins, fixing bugs etc. Also, free themes usually don’t come with any kind of support.
With a premium theme, someone’s getting paid to maintain the theme and offer support.
For this reason, I’m using paid themes on all of my websites.  Not everything you pay for is automatically better than what you can get for free, so here’s a quick guide to some premium themes:
 Thesis Theme This one is extremely popular and there’s no end to blogs running on this platform. Personally, I don’t recommend it and I think

it’s vastly overrated. I’ll spare you all the details, but just be aware that Thesis is not very beginner friendly. To fully make use of the customization features, you need to manually write CSS. Otherwise, your site will just end up looking like every other Thesis site out there 
 Elegant Themes I also need to mention Elegant Themes. The themes on offer are very well designed and can be used for many different purposes. Every theme also comes with an extensive and easy-to-use customization menu and there are usually several theme-colours available to choose from. Best of all, the themes are so cheap, it’s almost a no-brainer to get them. Check out their theme collection here. 

Themeforest is a marketplace where you can find WordPress themes created by talented designers and developers from all corners of the world. The quality standard is extremely high and especially for professional and portfolio-style themes, Themeforest is the place to check out.
And that’s it for my premium themes recommendations. That’s not to say there aren’t more options available, but the above represent the cream of the crop.

If you decide to go for a premium theme, you will have to upload the files to your server manually. The same is true for a few free themes and plugins for WordPress, as they are not all available through the official WordPress site. In any case, you will have to learn to manually edit the files on your server, so this is a good opportunity to do so.

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File and Content Management

The best way to access and edit files on your server is by setting up an FTP connection. FTP is short for File Transfer Protocol and it’s simply a way for your home computer to communicate and exchange data with the server.

There are many different FTP clients that you can use to do this with. I recommend using Filezilla, which is available for Windwos, Mac an Linux operating systems.

For reference, here’s a reminder on how to fill out the required fields, when setting up your connection:
 Host: either your main domain name with “ftp.” added to the beginning or the IP address of your hosting account. 

 Port: usually 21. 
 Logon Type: select “normal”. 
User: Enter your username here.  Password: Enter your password here.
Click on the “OK” button to save these settings.
Now, you can select this connection from the menu in the top left corner and click on the “Connect” button.
Once you click “Connect”, you’ll see the window on the right get populated with a list of files and folders. These are the files and folders on your server.

Open the “public_html” folder:

Among the files and folders in the “public_html” folder, you’ll see three folders with names beginning with “wp-“. This is where your WordPress installation is located. The one we are interested in is the one called “wp- content”. Double-click on it to open this folder.
Within, you’ll find three folders that are important: “plugins”, “themes” and “uploads”. As you can imagine, “plugins” is where your WordPress plugins are located, “themes” is where the themes are located and “uploads” is where all other files such as pictures and audio-files are located.

Now, to get a feel for how to use the FireFTP and how works with your website, let’s just upload a random image. The image doesn’t have to have anything to do with your blog and no one but yourself will ever see it, so just grab any random image you have stored on your hard-drive.
We are going to upload this image to the “uploads” folder, so the first thing to do is to open the “uploads” folder in FireFTP by double-clicking it.

In the file management window on the left side (which represents your computer), navigate to the folder that contains the file you want to upload. If you are using Windows and the file is on your desktop, you’d navigate to the desktop. If it’s located in your “Pictures” folder, you’d  navigate to Users\Yourusername\Pictures and select the picture from there.

I have created a simple image called “example.png” and placed it in one of my image-folders. All you need to do next drag and drop the image file from the left side of Filezilla into the folder you want to upload it to, on the right side.

The upload will begin immediately and just a second or two later, you should see the new file listed in the folder on the hosting account.
Now, to navigate to that image, input the following address into your browser’s navigation bar:
http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/filename.jpg
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Content

Congratulations, you’ve already come a long way!
There is more optimizing and tweaking to be done, but for the first part, your blog is good to go.

Before we continue, I recommend you get familiar with publishing content on your blog. If you log into your WordPress admin panel, you’ll see two options for adding content in the sidebar: “Posts” and “Pages”. 

Posts are your standard blog content. Each time you add a post, it appears on the first page or your blog page (depending on the theme), ahead of all the older posts.
The blog is dynamic, always showing the latest posts first. In addition, posts can be tagged and added to categories and this adds more sorting options (e.g. show all posts in a certain category).
Pages, on the other hand, are static. They don’t appear on your homepage, don’t use categories or tags and can usually be navigated to from a navigation bar on your site.
Apart from this, there’s no difference between posts and pages. In terms of content, they are identical; anything you can publish on a post, you can also publish on a page and vice versa.

You can click on either “Posts” or “Pages” and you’ll see a drop-down menu from which you can choose to create new posts/pages or edit existing ones. Go ahead and click on “Posts”, then “Add New”.
You’ll see a page with a simple  text-editor as well as some extra fields for the title and the SEO-plugin we installed earlier on.
For now, all I want you to do is make a simple first post. Add a title, the post itself and create a fitting category for it (this can be a simple test post. Don’t worry about the actual content, just yet). Then hit “Preview” to see what the post will look like. You can save post and page drafts and preview them, while you’re working on them. Once you’re satisfied with what you see, you can click “Publish” to make the content visible and available to your visitors.

That’s it! You’ve made your first blog-post!

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Basic Optimization - Wordpress

Before moving on, feel free to create another post. You don’t have to, but you can, if you want to take a break from setting stuff up and just want to get some content online.

If you’re ready to move on, this next chapter is about basic site optimization. This includes, but is not limited to search engine optimization (SEO). A well optimized site is easy for your users to navigate, fast and pleasant to use and equipped with a few elements that make it search engine friendly.

Making a site user-friendly and optimizing it for your visitors is always a priority over optimizing it for search engines.

First things first: In your WordPress admin panel, click on “Settings” and then choose the “Privacy” option. In some cases, the default setting is to hide your blog from search engines.
If that’s the case, click on the radio button next to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone...” and then save the settings.

Next, let’s optimize the URL structure of your posts and pages. Go to “Settings” and then click on “Permalinks”. In the “Common Settings”, select “Post name”.

Postname titles are often not ideal either, though, because URLs should be kept relatively short. The URL should be short, to the point, on topic and memorable.

To people, the shorter URL looks more professional and to Google, it also looks better because the first one could be interpreted as an attempt at keyword stuffing (an outdated optimization “hack” that people used to use to get better rankings).


WordPress SEO by Yoast

When you activate the WordPress SEO plugin, it does most of the work for you. In the settings, there are many things you can change and modify, but none that you really need to. The default settings are fine.
One thing I recommend changing is the homepage title and meta description.

Titles and meta descriptions are what show up in search engine results as a listing and preview of the page content. The more compelling and interesting your titles and descriptions are, the more clicks you’ll get from search engine results.
The plugin also creates a sitemap for you, which is located at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml. You can submit this sitemap to a Google Webmaster account, but I recommend doing this at a later date, once you have some initial content on your site.
One of the most important features of the plugin you’ll find on your post/page editor screen:

For every post, you can manually edit the title (that will be shown in search results) and the description. The title will auto-generate based on the post or page title (which is shown on your site, at the top of the content). Sometimes, it can make sense to have slightly different page and content titles and if that’s the case, here is where you can make the edit.
For every post, I recommend that you add a custom meta description. This should just be a short and compelling description of what the content is about.
The SEO plugin does a whole range of other fancy stuff as well. Feel free to take a look around. You’ll find detailed explanations for most options.
What we’ve covered here are the essentials and they suffice to get you started.

Menus

Once you start setting up the basic content on your site, you’ll have to think about navigation. How and where can your visitors find your content?

Navigation is an important element for any website: offer too many options and you’ll confuse visitors, offer too little and visitors will be frustrated about not being able to find what they’re looking for.

Thankfully, with WordPress, you have full control over what your navigation elements will look like.
Go to the “Appearance” -> “Menus” item in the left sidebar in your WP admin panel.
To begin, create a new menu. You can call it “Test menu” or “Main menu” or whatever you want. Anything you set now can be changed later:

On the left side of the screen, you’ll see one or several options, depending on your theme. In most cases, you’ll have a “Primary Navigation” or “Main Menu” item and a drop-down. Here’s how this works: in the main area of the screen, you create and save menu structures. You can then assign these menus to your theme’s menu areas through the drop down. Some themes come with primary and secondary navigation and additional footer menus.
To create a menu, simply select post and pages from the right, click on the “Add to Menu” button:

You can easily create sub-menus and menu trees with drag and drop as well.
Remember to save your menu before exiting the screen.
Ideally, you want to keep the number of navigation items on your site to a minimum. Don’t overwhelm visitors with options, but give them easy access to your most important content.


Interlinking
Interlinking your pages is useful for your human visitors as well as for search engines. Whenever you reference one post from another one, create a link between the two. Whenever you are writing about a topic related to a past post, mention it and link to it. From time to time, go through some of your older posts and see if there are any opportunities to link from your older to your newer posts.
Having a good interlinking structure on your site makes navigation a lot easier and it encourages engagement. Visitors are more likely to consume your content, the easier that content is to consume. In addition, there are also SEO advantages to strongly interlinking your content.


Standard Pages
There are some pages any website should feature. These pages are:

About page about yourself or your company and the purpose of your website.

Contact page with a contact form (look for contact form plugins), where visitors can send you a message. 

Privacy Policy A page stating your privacy policy, i.e. what happens with people’s private data when they visit your site and say, leave a comment. You can use this privacy policy generator to create one for your site. Please take note that I am not a lawyer and I can’t guarantee that

Disclaimer A page stating whether you make money from your blog or not and if you ever get paid for your opinions. Use this easy generator to make one of your own. Again, I am not a lawyer etc..


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Conclusion

You’ve come a long way!

We’ve looked at how to register a domain, how to set up hosting, how to install WordPress, how to set it all up, how to install a theme and plugins, how to set up an FTP-connection and much more.
If you’ve followed along with all the steps, you already know far more about building websites than your average Joe. In fact, you’re almost an expert!
Most importantly, you now know more than enough to get started. 
Remember, most people attempting to create an online business  fail for two reasons:
 They never get up and actually do something 
They chase a dream without having any knowledge of the necessary fundamentals
In this respect, you are already way ahead of the game. Keep it up and good things will happen.

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