How to Setup a Website

Posted on 21. Mar, 2010 by Sarthak in Webmaster

Having a website of your own is a matter of prestige and envy, and a lot of people (mistakenly) think that it either requires exceptional programming skills, or a lot of money to spend, or both. Actually, its not that difficult and not at all expensive to make your own website.

This is particularly true when you use a CMS (Content Management System) based site, e.g. I am using a blog software cum CMS called WordPress. It is the most popular blogging platform for self hosted domains (more on domain names later in this article). The beauty of WordPress is that you can easily modify it too look like a professional website or blog, with minimum skills required on your side. It is also extremely easy to update, unlike static HTML and CSS based websites.

Building a wordpress powered site is extremely simple, and you can make your own if you follow these steps:

1. Buy a domain name

2. Purchase web hosting

3. Change Nameservers in domain registrar

4. Install wordpress with one-click

5. Add a theme (template) and some plugins

And thats all, you will be ready with a website of your own that requires minimum maintenance and is easiest to update. Now I will expand upon the steps mentioned above.

1. Buying a domain name

A domain name is simply the address that you want for your website. For example, the domain name for this website is “lughole.net.” The domain name for Facebook’s website is facebook.com and so on. Now you have to decide what kind of name you want and its extension. By extension I mean whether it will be a .com, a .net or a co.uk domain name. There are in fact a lot of geographic extensions for domain names and some people and businesses like to have their domain names cater to a particular region. For example, Google’s website for India is google.co.in while for the UK its google.co.uk.

Where to buy domain names?

When you buy a domain name, you actually register it with yourself for a period of time, which is a minimum of 1 year. You can renew your domain registration just before its expiration or earlier.

There are a lot of Domain Registrars from whom you can buy a domain. However, I would like to recommend the best ones for my site’s readers. So here goes:

- If you are based in United Kingdom, NAMESCO is the best domain registrar for you. Just go to the website, search for a domain you prefer and if its available just buy it. A two-year registration for a .co.uk domain costs 8 Pounds here.

- For US, and the rest of the world, GoDaddy is usually the preferred place to buy domain names. It keeps running discount promotions and has the best rates.

All legal domain registrars are governed by a body called ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

2. Purchasing Web Hosting

When you think of buying web hosting, think of it like buying a hard disk – the only difference is that this hard disk lies somewhere on the Internet – and is used to keep your website’s files accessible to people. When you buy web hosting you get two things – webspace and bandwidth. Webspace is of course the amount of space you get for keeping the files, while bandwidth refers to the amount of traffic (visitors) that the site can handle each month.

Where to buy Web hosting?

Buying a web hosting package can get your pockets shrunk if you don’t take correct advice! There are all sorts of web hosting plans available. Many companies will try to convince you to purchase a super expensive plan which you actually won’t need. A wordpress site does not require gigantic resources so its quite cheap to maintain. However, beware of dubious web hosts who sell you hosting for as low as $1 a month. Many are either scams or link farms. Here’s what I recommend

- If you plan to host just one site, you could purchase the hosting from where you bought your domain name – I would only exclude GoDaddy here since it is an expensive host and offers the least freedom for website growth.

- A great place to buy web hosting is FatCow. They have an annual package that saves you a lot of money and gives you a domain name for free when you buy it. Also, the FatCow hosting has a fairly small carbon footprint as its run on wind energy.

- If you plan to host unlimited websites, then HostGator is the host for you. In fact its great for hosting single sites as well, but FatCow beat it in the annual price package. Coming back to multiple site hosting, you can host unlimited sites with hostgator for $7.95 a month, and that’s a steal.

3. Changing Nameservers

Steps 1 and 2 were really the main steps in the whole process. Now comes the third step, which needs to be followed only if you purchase web hosting from a place different from where you purchased the domain name (actually, this is usually the case).

Your new webhost will have emailed you the DNS settings or more specifically the Domain Name Servers with your web hosing info. Don’t worry its not as complicated as it may sound. These are usually just two or three server addresses. You need to input these addresses into the nameservers panel in the domain management tab of your domain registrar.

Inputting hostgator DNS into Godaddy's domain management

Once you save the settings, the new DNS settings for your domain registrar can take around 24 hours to resolve to your web host.

4. Installing WordPress

Once the nameservers are resolved to your web host, you get a blank website. On this blank website you will now install wordpress. The slow and traditional way is to download the latest wordpress script from wordpress.org, upload it via an FTP program to your web hosting and then install it using MySQL.

However, we can do it faster with just a few clicks!

a.) Login to your webhost’s control panel (they will give you the login info when you buy a hosting), find fantastico or any other automatic script installer that is there in the website control panel and click on it.

wordpress install b.) From the Fantastico interface, scroll down until you see the Blogs section and just below it, you should see WordPress in the list. Click on the WordPress
c.) Fill in the blanks, e.eg. the user-name and password you want for the site, title and description, email address etc. Then click “install”. Once installed fantastico will give you a summary of the installation process. Click on “finish installation”, and wordpress will be installed on your domain.

5. Adding Themes and Plugins to WordPress

WordPress has hundreds of thousands of developers – most of whom develop themes (templates) and plugins for FREE. They just want credit for their work in the footer of a site and are happy to get donations. You can find a whole lot of free wordpress themes in the wordpress codex.

Installing wordpress themes

- The first thing you will want to do is download the theme or plugin to your computer and remember where you saved it. DO NOT unzip the file, just leave it the way it is.

- Now log in to your WordPress admin panel and click on “Add New Themes” or “Add New” under plugins.

- Click “Upload” in the menu at the top of the page then click the “Browse” button on the next page. This will take you to your computer where you can navigate to the file you downloaded. Select the file by clicking on it, then click the “Open” button, then the “Install” button.

WordPress will automatically upload, unzip, and install your theme or plugin. All you need to do at this point is to activate the theme or plugin and configure any settings that may be available.

WordPress plugins

These are files that add functionality to a wordpress powered site. For example,. this site uses plugins to generate social bookmarking icons under each blog post. It also uses a plugin to generate a contact form on the contact page. The way to install plugins is almost the same as with themes.

I hope this guide is understandable and helps you learn how to setup a wordpress powered site like this one. I am always happy to guide friends and can offer professional wordpress services on demand.