You should see a page like this:

Fill in the title of your website and your email address. This address is going to be used only by your own website, so don’t worry about spam. Click on the Install WordPress button. You should get a page like this:

Copy that password to your clipboard. You will also get an email with the password send to your email account. Click on Login. Enter Admin as the Username and paste in the password.

Login and you will get to your WordPress dashboard. This page allows you to manage your website and create new pages, new blog posts, edit your settings, turn on new features and templates, etc..

First thing to do, find the Users link at the far right of the page and change your admin password. In the users page, click on the Admin user to get to the details for Admin. Scroll down the page to the change password section.

Even though your generated password is very random, it’s best to have one that you can remember and that hasn’t been emailed to your email account.

Next, click on the Visit Site button. It should be at the top of the page next to your Title. This is your site:

Notice that the Title matches the title from the Install script. Everything else has been provided as a default by the install script.

Congrats! You now have your own website.

Go back to your site’s dashboard and make it into your own special creation. This site looked exactly like that image when I first created it. Check out the design section of the dashboard and look into the Themes that are available to get a new look for your site.

Have Fun!

Finish installing FileZilla and start the program. Pull up the Site Manager from the File menu. Fill in your URL in the Host field. Enter your Username and Password in their fields and click Connect.

Once you are connected, Filezilla will show a tree structure of your computers files on the left side and your hosting account files on the right. There’s another section below the tree structure to show the contents of the current directory.

Navigate the left side to your wordpress directory on your computer. Copy the contents of the wordpress directory and the sub-folders over to your hosting account.

Don’t make a wordpress folder on the host site unless you want to access your wordpress blog using this directory in the URL. Without this folder, you will access your wordpress blog directly from your URL: http://www.yourhostingsite.com.

If you have a WordPress directory on your host, your URL would just be: http://www.yourhostingsite.com/wordpress/.

Upload all of your files, but don’t try to access your site yet.

Next, click on the New User link.

Create a Username and password, and select the directory. Unless you’ve done some other work on this hosting account, you can probably select /. as your directory.

You should be able to access your site with FTP shortly. If you make a modification to these settings, you’ll get a message that your changes will be ready in 30 minutes.

Remember to add your FTP information to your notes file. The username is both parts, the u31234563 and the part you created with a dash in between the parts. Mine would be u31234563-demo.

• WordPress - Contains the main php files and 3 sub-directories
  • wp-content
  • wp-admin
  • wp-includes

Start by renaming wp-config-sample.php from the WordPress directory to wp-config.php (remove the -sample). Edit wp-config.php with Notepad or another text editor.

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Fill in your database details using the notes that you saved from creating your MySQL database. The DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD should be pretty simple. On 1and1, you will need to fill in the DB_HOST with the Host Name information.

Final changes:

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase.  You won't have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated.  You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/
// to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.
define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); // Change this to a unique phrase.

Put in your own phrase or follow the link to build one.

1. Under the Administration Tab, select the Web Space & Access heading in the left menu
2. Select MySQL Administration.
3. Add New Database, Provide a description and select MySQL 5.0 as the version.

When you click Set Up, 1and1.com will create your database and show you the details. Remember to add the Databases Details to your notes file. You will need these to configure WordPress to connect to your new database.

Go ahead and download the zip file and save it on your computer. You will need to unzip the file using something like WinZip and let it build all of the folders on your computer.

I’ve had great luck with 1and1.com.  They are one of the industy leaders.  Bottom line, 90 Day Guarantee, great deals. (Disclaimer: These deals change over time. It might be different when you get there.)

Purchasing your domain name and hosting from 1and1.com is pretty straight forward. If you just finished picking your domain name, you should be able to click on the box next to the name you’ve chosen and click continue.You should see a page like this:

At this point, you just need to pick your package and work through a checkout process. I can’t really show pictures of this because I already have my account.

A simple tip:

Create a text document to hold some details in a common spot for your site. You will want to paste into this document URL’s, ID’s and Passwords, notes from various steps and tasks.

Nothing complex is needed for this. Just a simple text file in a place that you can easily find.

Make sure you save your customer number, your domain and any links and passwords that 1and1 gives you. These will be used later.