5 Installing WordPress
“But wait!” you may be shouting. “I don’t want a blog. I want a REAL website!”
It’s true that WordPress was created for people to use to write weblogs — blogs. But over the years WordPress and its associated themes and plug-ins have grown so versatile that many, many non-blog type websites are also built using the WordPress platform.
There are two excellent reasons why my plan for building an effective website in a very short time is based on WordPress…
- It’s very fast and simple to do, and
- Search engines LOVE WordPress websites, so you will get indexed very quickly.
When you follow my directions, Google’s spiders will race through the world wide web and find your WordPress site practically instantly. With a conventional website, it can take weeks or months before search engines notice you, even if you register your URL with them.
Do I know this system really works? Yes. I recently had a brand new domain achieve high search engine ranking (#8 out of 26,400) in only four days. I’ll give you details later on in the chapter about optimization. But for now, let’s get your site installed.
There are two ways to install WordPress. The hard way is to follow WordPress’s instructions to download the latest version free from WordPress.org, unzip it, set up a MySQL database, configure your settings, upload everything to your host, and then go through the installation procedure.
The easy way is to use CPanel and push two buttons. I’ll walk you through it.
After you have arrived at your CPanel, scroll down toward the bottom. If you’re on HostGator, it will look like this…
Click on “Fantastico De Luxe”, and you’ll be taken to a page that looks something like this…
Click on WordPress
Click on New Installation
Enter a username and password, and then follow a few more simple instructions.
Okay, maybe you have to push more than two buttons, but it’s still a process that takes only seconds instead of hours.
Once you have WordPress installed on your site, the next thing to do is customize it. You’re going to install a theme and some plug-ins, and then tweek them so Google and its colleagues will notice you and get you listed as fast as possible.