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This first session is on installing and configuring WordPress. And the very first thing we’re going to do is install WordPress for the very first time on your primary domain. In this case I set up a hosting account with Hostgator and I don’t have anything installed on it at all. I created a primary domain called wp47bootcamp as my primary domain.
Most you are probably already past this but if you’re looking at it and wondering how to accomplish this we have several beginner articles that should be helpful: selecting a small business domain name; guidelines for setting up a small business website and guidelines for selecting a Hosting Provider.
Installation Differs Depending on the Host
Let’s get started installing WordPress for the first time on your primary domain of your hosting account. Everybody does this a little bit differently. Most of the instructional material I have on my site is about Bluehost so I thought I would demonstrate this here with Hostgator. Installation on Hostgator looks a little different than it does on Bluehost.
Let’s refresh this and make sure I’m logged in. We’re going to kill the advertisements. These hosting companies have become masters at selling you stuff and you’re going to see that right away as we work our way through this process.
WordPress Installer
Come over here to the WordPress installer and click on it. There are other ways to get to this WordPress installer. You can see on the left-hand side there’s a Marketplace, Site Builder & CMS so if you click on it, it will look a little different.
Well, it’s installing WordPress 4.6.1. Let’s see if there a way for us to change that to WordPress 4.7? It doesn’t look like it so we’ll have to upgrade to WordPress 4.7 after this. We’re going to install here in wp47bootcamp.com.
Where to Install WordPress
You can see there’s a question here about directory. Typically, you will install WordPress in your primary domain not in a directory. That’s why I talked about this being in your primary domain so we won’t put into directory in there. Hit next. And now we have a blog title – that’s really your site title. I’m going to call this WordPress 4.7 Bootcamp.
Admin User Name
For the admin user name you should use your full name if you’re going to display an author name. If you have an author page and you have content that you want to be indexed by Google with your author name in the URL then your real name is the name that should be in here.
I don’t really care about that that for this site so I’m just going to say byobrick.
User Name is Permanent
Note that you can create another user somewhere down the road if you choose but what you cannot do is change your username. There’s no way for you to change a username in WordPress, short of hacking the database. So if you don’t like what you used later you’re going to have to create new user.
Complete the Install
My admin email would be rick@byobwebsite.com. You’re going to automatically create a new database for the installation. Let’s look at this change the install location. Okay, that wasn’t what we were looking for.
Let’s finish filling out these fields. WordPress 4.7 Bootcamp for the title. Admin user is byobrick. Add first and last name and the email I want to use, rick@byobwebsite.com.
Check the accept the terms of service and then hit the install now button. This is the password that they’ve assigned to me. My suggestion is that you ignore all this sales copy for now. There may be a point in time which you want to buy something from them but this is not that time.
Login to Your Site
Let’s go immediately to wp47bootcamp.com. I’ll right click and open it in a new tab. Here’s where you can login to your site. Note how you’ve got all these messages. So, click on admin WP login and so it’s byobrick and i’ll add the password. Now we are logged in.