Web design and development

If you’re new to  hosting your own website or have never touched wordpress before then manually installing wordpress may be a little tricky. For those of you who have  never done it, don’t worry because it’s really a easy process. WordPress gives you the ability to blog or use it as a cms, whilst having full control over the design and development of the site.

Here is an easy to manage list on what to do.

1. Download the wordpress package here
2. unzip the package
3. Transfer the wordpress files from your local machine to the server you will be hosting wordpress on, using FTP. Some FTP clients are smartFTP, fileZilla and winSCP, all will do a great job at what we need to do.
4. Now you must choose where wordpress will be stored. If you want it in the root directory then it is in public_html. If you want it in a sub directory or another folder navigate to that and transfer the files within that directory.  (NB. transfer the files inside the wordpress folder not the “wordpress” folder itself.
5. It’s at this point whilst the files are transferring that I like to create my database
6. Create a MySQL database a user and also password for that database
7. Once the files have been transferred edit the file called wp-config-sample
8. Where opened, amend the php file to include the name of your database, user and password in the appropriate areas (NB. make sure to wrap them inside single quotes eg ‘password’
9. Change the file name from wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php then upload it to your server, or if you edited live leave it on the server.
10. Once these steps have been completed and you are confident the data is correct you need to run the install wordpress script.
11. If you have installed wordpress in the root directory then you would navigate to “http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php” with your domain being in place of example.com. If you installed wordpress in another directory then navigate to that address with /wp-admin/install.php after it.
12. Now you will be prompted to enter your details about your blog and email address
13. That’s it, wordpress wil be installed and you’re ready to rock and roll!
14. If wordpress is running fine then there is no need to worry about this next step.
15. Sometimes you may get a 500 server error, the most common reason for this is in fact that index.php has it’s permissions set to 777 or 775. All you need to do is go into your FTP and select index.php (wherever you installed wordpress) and change the permission to 755. This should fix the problem.
16. If that is still not solving the issue, check the error log and see what the problem is as sometimes php may not be enabled.

Well that’s my guide, if you have any other queries or suggestions please leave a comment and i’ll get back to you as soon as I can