Voosh Themes

Five Essential Things You Need When Creating A Wordpress Site

This is the third part of A Beginner’s Guide to Wordpress – in the second part I provided a high level overview of how Wordpress works – in this post I’ll be covering the core things that you need to create and setup your own Wordpress site.

Before covering these, it’s worth mentioning an issue that can often be the source of some confusion if you’re new to Wordpress. This issue is about there being two different version of Wordpress that you can make use of. One version is available at Wordpress.org – here you can download and install the latest version of Wordpress and then host that somewhere yourself. This offers you complete control over your site and once it’s setup and configured on your server you can do what you like with it.

Wordpress.com, on the other hand, is a blogging service that is provided and hosted by Automattic – the parent company of Wordpress – completely free of charge. When you create a new blog it will be located at an address like “yoursitename.wordpress.com” and you don’t have to install anything yourself. With this version you have much less control – for instance, you can’t install your own plugins which limits the level to which you can customize your blog.

The version that you choose to use is up to you – for this guide I’m assuming that you’re using the self-hosted version (available at Wordpress.org) – largely because it provides you with so much more control over your site and is still relatively easy to setup and get started (I’ll be covering installation in part four).

So, now we’ve touched on the two different versions of Wordpress, let’s get back to the different things that you’ll need to setup your own site.

1. A Domain Name

This is a must if you are going to create your own self-hosted installation of Wordpress. An example of a domain name is www.vooshthemes.com – if you’ve not purchased a domain before, it’s very simple and easy to do. There are a lot of providers out there – GoDaddy.com is one of the most popular around at the moment.

2. Some Web Space

Once you have a domain name, you then need to buy some web space from a hosting company which then points to your domain name. This is essentially where your Wordpress site will be stored – be aware that you don’t need to buy your domain name and hosting from the same place – in fact, you can often get a better deal if you buy the two separately. Also make sure that your web host provides you with at least one MySQL database – you’ll need to use this when installing your blog. Most major web hosts will provide this as standard, but just make sure that it’s included. I personally use Hostgator as my web host and can highly recommend them – their prices are very reasonable and the level of support is excellent.

3. The *Latest* Wordpress Version

This might be an obvious one, but make sure that you have the *latest* version of Wordpress – older versions will not be as secure as the newer ones and you will potentially leave yourself open to getting hacked or experiencing other problems associated with older versions. You can get the latest version from Wordpress.org.

4. A Decent Code Editor

If you need to tweak the appearance and functioning of your site in some way you’ll need a decent code editor to help you with this task. Traditionally WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors such as Frontpage and Dreamweaver were used for web development (and still are today – Dreamweaver remains popular) – however, for tweaking your Wordpress site, or for building your own themes, such applications aren’t really appropriate. You’ll be much better off with a quality code editor – some of the best and most popular include Textmate, UltraEdit, TextWrangler, and Notepad++.

5. FTP Software

You will also need a way to transfer your Wordpress files to your sever – some FTP software will do this for you and there are a wide range of different options to choose from. I personally use FileZilla which is simple and easy to use – and best of all it’s free! Just a quick note for MAC users – an interesting option is Coda – this is a popular code editor and FTP client all combined into one application – it’s not free, but at the same time isn’t too expensive.

Conclusion

So that’s essentially all you need to get your own Wordpress site up and running. In part four I’m going to explain how you can complete a fresh Wordpress install – it’s very quick and easy to do and you can literally have a new site up and running in a matter minutes.

Table Of Contents

1. What Makes Wordpress So Great?
2. Understanding How Wordpress Works
3. Five Essential Things You Need For Building A Wordpress Blog
4. How To Complete A Fresh Wordpress Install
5. Wordpress Posts, Pages, And Other Concepts
6. Seven Points To Consider When Choosing A New Wordpress Theme
7. Ten Free Wordpress Plugins That You Should Install