Registering a Domain and Creating a Homepage in Wordpress

Transcription

1 Registering a Domain and Creating a Homepage in Wordpress This tutorial is intended to provide you with the skills to register a new domain, set up your hosting account, and create a homepage in Wordpress, one of the largest and fastest growing Content Management Systems(CMS). In order to complete this tutorial, you will need a domain and a hosting account. We will be using NameSilo.com for the domain registrar and Bluehost as the web host, but there are many, many other services to choose from. This is a two part tutorial. The first part involves registering your domain and setting up your web hosting. If you have already have a registered domain and web hosting, then you do not need to complete Part 1 and can move on to Part 2. Part 1 Step 1 Creating your NameSilo Account: To start, goto You will need to create a new account unless you have already created an account here.

2 Click on the link to create a new account. You will need to fill out all of the required information to create your account. Step 2 Registering your domain: After registering your account, it is now time to register your domain. If you have a great idea for a domain name then you are set. However, if you are having difficulty deciding on a domain name, the key is to make it relative to your website. If you are creating a website for a WordPress tutorial business in Seattle, your domain name should be something like If you have a name for your business, you will definitely want to include that in your domain. Make sure it is creative and memorable, you do not want to register a domain that is so long that a person cannot remember it right after you tell them! Now that you have chosen your domain, let's register it. Log in to your NameSilo account if you have not already. Feel free to look around your Account page and familiarize yourself with the User Interface(UI). This is a good idea regardless of where you register your domain. If you are ready to go now, click on the register tab: Now go ahead and enter the domain you would like in the domain search. There is a chance that the domain you choose will have already been taken, so it is a good idea to have a couple of domains in mind just in case this happens.

3 After entering the domain, you should see this: You can see that the domain is available and you can also see that they provide various domain extensions. It is a good idea to register other domain extensions so that another person with the same idea for a domain name cannot come along and register the.net version of your domain for instance. However, for this tutorial, you will only need to register one domain and I would recommend the.com extension if it is available. Now if you are ready, go ahead and click the Register Checked Domains button. You will be taken to the shopping cart page where you can see the details of the purchase you are about to make. You will want to review this and make sure everything is in order before moving forward. After reviewing the information, go ahead and click on the Continue button at the bottom of the page. Now you are on the payment page, here you will need to enter your payment information. Again, review all the information to make sure it is correct, and if you are sure that you are ready to move forward, go ahead and click the Place My Order button. You will be taken back to the account page where you should see that you now have an active domain:

4 You can click on that active domain to see more information on the domain and this is where you will need to go later in the tutorial after you have configured your web hosting. Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of whatever domain name you chose to register! Now we can move forward to the hosting and on to the best part, creating your homepage! Step 3 Web Hosting: For this tutorial, we are going to use Bluehost for our web hosting, but again, there are many different hosting services so feel free to explore them and choose which one works best for you. Go to Now you will need to create an account with Bluehost so this part of the tutorial will be somewhat similar to the previous account creation at NameSilo. After reaching the Bluehost homepage, click on the Sign Up Now button in the middle of the page:

5 Since you have already registered a domain, you can enter your domain in the I Have a Domain Name text box and click the Next button. Now you will need to enter your account information and select a hosting package that you would like for your domain. As with most hosting packages, it is cheaper per month to select a longer term package, but will cost more upfront so that is a decision that you will have to make. By default, there will be security and site backup added to your plan, however these services cost extra so if you are not interested in them, make sure to deselect the checkboxes on the payment form.

6 After you are certain you have the hosting plan that you would like and you have filled out the payment information, go ahead and click the Next button at the bottom of the page. The next page is not necessary and you will probably see something like this regardless of where you host your domain. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Continue button. Now you have reached the Congratulations page. You will need to create a password for your account. Go ahead and click on the Create your password link at the top of the page. Enter your password and then click on Create. You will be taken to the login page so where you can see that your domain is your username so you will just need to enter your password and click Login. At this point, you should have received an from Bluehost with Welcome to Bluehost! in the Subject line. You will need this for the next step in the tutorial so please make sure you have this available. You have now officially configured your web hosting and registered your domain so now it is time to tie them together! Step 4 Changing the Nameservers: In this tutorial, we have used a separate domain registrar and a separate web host so

7 in order to have the domain point towards the web host, we need to update the nameservers associated with the domain. To do this, you will need to be logged into your account at NameSilo. Now open the you received from Bluehost. You should see a section that says Get Started: and under Domains section, a link that says Point to Bluehost. Click on this link and you should see a new page open with the Bluehost nameserver information. You can see the nameservers here they should be ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com. Now go to your Account page at NameSilo. Open up your Active Domains page and select the domain you have registered. Now you should be on the Domain Console page. Here you can see all of the domain information, but what we are focusing on is the NameServers section.

8 Click on the Change link next to NameServers. You will see the nameservers that were assigned by NameSilo. Now you will need delete those nameservers and add in the ones provided by Bluehost (ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com).

9 Once you have entered this information, click the Submit button at the bottom of the page. Now you have completed the first part of this tutorial. Updating the nameservers can take some time so feel free to come back to this tutorial later. Part 2 Step 1 Setting up your Wordpress page: There are two ways to install Wordpress to your domain. One way involves Famous 5-Minute Installation which can be found at The other way is easier and faster so that is the method that we will use in this tutorial. However, it requires a web host that provides Simple Script installations so depending on your web host, you may have to use the other method. If you are not logged into your Bluehost account, you will need to login by clicking the Control Panel Login button at the top of the page. After you login, you will see your home page for your Bluehost account. We need to access the cpanel feature so click on the cpanel button at the top of the page.

10 After clikcing on this button, you will see the cpanel interface. There are many options to go through here so feel free to explore all of the options here. After you are ready, find the Site Builder section of the page and click on the Wordpress link. We are almost ready to install Wordpress, just click on the WordPress link under the Blogs section of the page. Now you have the option of installing a new version of Wordpress or importing an existing installation. Assuming that you have not installed Wordpress, go ahead and select the Install button. You should see a page that looks like this:

11 Notice that here you have the option to install Wordpress to a specific location. We are just going to install it directly to your domain so that your site will appear at the base domain that you have chosen. You also have the option to set a Site Name, here you might want to put the actual name of your business or service or whatever it is main theme of your site, in this case I will change the site name to Seattle WP Tutorial. You will also notice that there are several plugins and themes that are selected to be installed with Wordpress. In this tutorial, we will deselect these, but you can choose to have them installed if you would like. After you are ready, go ahead and click the Complete button at the bottom of the page. You may get an error message that says that the directory exists, go ahead and check the box that says Directory exists! I understand that continuing will overwrite files. Make sure to deselect the plugins and themes boxes again if you chose to do so in the first place. Now you should see that the installation is complete and you should see your username and password information for your domain, make sure to save this information because you will need it to login to the backend of your Wordpress site.

12 Step 2 Logging into your Wordpress site: Now you can actually enter your domain into a web browser and see that Wordpress has been installed. The next step is to setup your homepage. Enter the URL of your site into your web browser and then append /wp-admin to the end. For instance, Enter the user information that was provided in the last step. Now you should be at the Wordpress Dashboard.

13 This is where everything that you see on your website is managed. From here, you can customize each page, you can add photos, change text, and pretty much manage your entire site. This is something that you will want to become very familiar with because the more you know about the Dashboard, the more you can customize your site. In this tutorial, we are just going to start by customizing the homepage. Step 3 Customizing the Homepage: One thing to keep in mind is that Wordpress was originally created for blogging purposes. With that in mind, you will note that the homepage of your website is actually a blog and the initial information is actually a blog post. Now go back to the Dashboard and lets get started. You will notice on the Dashboard, the menu is on the left. Go ahead and select Posts from the menu. You will see a post that says Hello World! This is the default post that is created when you install Wordpress. You can delete this later if you choose to, but for now we are just going to create a new post. Go ahead and select Add New in the submenu under Posts.

14 Now you can create a post that will appear on your homepage. You can enter a title, and any content that you would like. You can also categorize your posts so that down the line, you can organize and filter your posts. Go ahead and add whatever content you would like such as photos, videos, and text (you can add images by selecting the Add Media button just blow the post title). After you have added all the information that you want to add, click the Publish button on the right side of the page. Now you have published your first post and added your own customized content to your website! You can go to your website and see the changes that you have made.

15 From here the possibilities are only limited by your creativity! Go forth and create a super cool blog or website and remember, there are always more tutorials out there to help you if you get stuck! Thank you for using this tutorial, I hope it was helpful!

16 Sources: