Crowd Mountain Bootcamp Module 02 Step 02: Install WordPress

Transcript:

The first thing we’re going to do is install WordPress on our domain.

I’ve logged in to my domain account that I purchased for juicecleansenow.com and this is what my cPanel looks like.

Your host should absolutely be using cPanel and you should also have a link to Fantastico De Luxe (see icon in screenshot below)

If you’re using a webhost that doesn’t use this I suggest you got a host that does because cPanel and Fantastico will make your life a lot easier.

So I click on the Fantastico link and it’s going load up a page that offers me a bunch of scripts that I want to install.

The one I want is WordPress, so click the WordPress button and then you’ll be given some options.

I want to create a new installation because I don’t currently have WordPress installed on this domain. I’m installing on the domain juicecleansenow.com

If this is a new site you should leave the directory box blank. (see below)

If it’s a site you already own and you’re trying to install WordPress in a subdirectory, then you need to indicate the name of the subdirectory where you want to install WordPress.

So you might have yoursite.com and you can install WordPress on the back end in a folder and put the name of that folder after yoursite.com Try to include your keywords for the folder if they’re not too long.

Most of us will be doing a brand new install on a brand new domain, so leave it blank.

For admin access data, put in your username and password that you want to use.

Then in Base configuration, you’ll create a nickname for your administrator and that nickname should include your keywords.

For the email, make it admin@yoursite.com and for the site name, change it to your main keyword.

The description should use your main keyword again and I’ve just typed in juice cleanse information and resources.

Now click install WordPress.

You’ll get a little confirmation screen.  Click finish installation.

Now you’re given your username and password and the url to your admin area.

Click on the url, then enter your username and password and click log in now.

Here’s what it looks like (below)

This is the brand new WordPress 2.7.1.

Your’s may look a bit different if WordPress has upgraded or changed since my video was made but the basics will be the same.

So that’s how you install WordPress using Fantastico – very easy – and that’s why you want a host that uses Fantastico.

A suggestion for that type of webhost is hostgator.

Customizing your WordPress site

Looking at the Settings on the left hand side

Click on General

Firstly change the WordPress address and Blog address to contain www.  ie. http://www.mysite.com  YOu don’t have to, but most people tend to use www in their addresses.

You might like to change your time and date settings.

Then click save changes.

When you do that, you’ll be brought back to the log in page because now you’re logging in to www.mysite.com instead of just mysite.com

Log back in, go to Settings and head over to Writing.

I like to change the size of the postbox to 20 lines.

Have a look at update services, but leave it as it is.

I know a lot of people get excited about having giant ping services, but we’re not going to do that initially.  It’s for later on.

Now click on the reading tab on the left hand sidebar

You want your front page to display your latest posts at this time.

Leave blog pages shown at 10.

Change syndication feeds (RSS feeds) to 100 for more content to be out there in your RSS feed.

In all honesty spammers will get hold of your RSS feed and republish it. Some of them are smart enough to take your links out and steal your RSS feed, but many aren’t or just don’t care and if this happens I’ll just get some extra link juice, which is fine.

So that’s why I suggest you set your syndication feed to show more posts.

Save changes.

Now go to Discussion from the left hand sidebar.

Uncheck “Allow link notifications from other blogs”

I don’t publish trackbacks on my niche sites. If you allow links, this will show up on your site as “hey this person just linked to you” and you don’t need that.

I might also uncheck “allow people to post comments on the article” but this can change depending on the content of your site.

Are you trying to create a community around your site where people talk about issues?  Or are you trying to create a site that just provides information for people and then they move on and either purchase an affiliate product or click an Adsense ad or whatever that might be.

You really have to think about your topic too.  In something like a juice cleanse site it actually might behove me to allow comments because people could discuss the article I’ve written about a certain type of juice cleanse and provide their own feedback and experience with that juice cleanse.

So I’m actually going to leave “allow people to post comments” as a default because it can create a community and it can create people talking about it.

Whereas if I were publishing a site where I was reviewing a particular product and it was going to be a pure affiliate site that would just link to that product after a good review, I might not want comments on it.

That’s going to be niche specific for you and depend on the product that you’re going to be writing about.

For comment settings, I uncheck email me whenever anyone posts a comment cause I don’t care, but do email me when a comment is held for moderation because I need to check it.

Before a comment appears, an administrator must always approve the comment.  I do check this because I don’t want spammers appearing on my sites.

Down in comment moderation, comment blacklist and avators, the default is fine.

Click save changes.

Now go to Permalinks – how your urls appear on your blog.

We need to change the permalink structure.

Using FTP

Mostly, if you change this, you’ll get an error message saying your ht file needs to be updated so let’s go ahead and open our FTP client so we can change that ahead of time.

This is what Filezilla looks like.  This is what I use for an FTP client. You’ll just put in your host name ftp.juicecleansenow.com and your username and password that your host gave you when you set up an account with them.

Click quickconnect.  It’s going to connect to my website for me.

You’re going to get a little heirarchy (in remote site) so you’ll click on that (+)

and go into the public_html folder

We scroll down to find the file htaccess
Right click on it and select file permissions.

And you’ll see this box come up (below).

Numeric value is 644.

We change it to 777 just for a moment

Now head on back to your WordPress Permalink screen.

Click on custom structure and put in /%category%/%postname%/

and click save changes.

That’s going to update your htaccess.

You should get a success message that says Permalink structure updated.

If you didn’t change your htaccess, then that might not work.

Now back to the ftp tag where you change your file permissions back to 644 so that everything is secure.

You’ve just changed the way the urls on the site work.

Let’s go over to the site.

Here’s the default install

Have a look at how our urls look.  If you hover over the default post that WordPress puts in called Hello World! you’ll see it goes /uncategorized/helloworld and that’s because we haven’t created categories yet, but once you create categories that will be /category/postname

This is good for SEO cause it allows you to put your keywords in your url structure.  And Google likes to see keywords in your urls.  It just gives them another opportunity to see what your site’s about.

That’s all you need to do to get your WordPress default installation to get it kinda moving in the right direction, but we’re going to do a lot more in the following videos to optimize our WordPress to the absolute hilt so it becomes a total search engine magnet.