Hey everyone! Today I am so excited because I am going to teach you how to build a WordPress website. It is not as difficult as it seems and I’m going to hold your hand throughout the entire process and teach you this very valuable skill. Whether you want to start a business, or you want to start a blog, or maybe you just want to add this to your resume, this skill is going to help earn money and it could change your life.

I’m so excited to be the one to teach you how to do it and you can always ask me for help. If you have any questions feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help you. So without further ado, let’s get started!

Note: This blog post is Lesson 1 out of a 4-part series, From Zero to WordPress Hero(ine). Please be sure to watch the other 3 lessons in this series. Also, each lesson is accompanied by a YouTube video which can be found on this page. Included below is a Table of Contents so that you can see where in the video you can skip ahead to if necessary.

Video Table of Contents:

• 0:45 Intro
• 1:46 What’s in this Course
• 3:10 STEP 1: Getting Started with Your Domain Name
• 3:42 Examples of Bad Domain Names
• 5:00 Tips for Choosing a Good Domain Name
• 6:05 STEP 2: Domain Registration and Hosting Setup
• 7:32 Signing up using Blue Host
• 10:13 Log Into Blue Host Control Panel
• 11:21 WordPress Installation
• 12:24 Finalize WordPress Installation
• 12:53 WordPress Installation is Complete!

This is a FREE WordPress course and a complete beginner’s guide to building a WordPress website and blog. I am really excited to show you how you can be empowered by knowing how to build a website.

So, a little bit about this course; I broke this up into four parts and so I encourage you to be sure to watch all four of the parts of the series and do it in order so that you can benefit as much as possible because each video is going to be building on the knowledge of the previous one. So I encourage you not to skip around unless you’re already pretty familiar with it and you feel like you kind of know some things.

What You’ll Learn in this Course:

1. Lesson 1: How to Set Up Your WordPress Website
   In the first tutorial, you will learn how to set up your WordPress website which is surprisingly very easy. Some people already know how to do this. If you do, feel free to skip to the second video, however, if you don’t, let me hold your hand and show you how it’s done.
2. Lesson 2: How to Add Content to Your WordPress Website
   In the second tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add content to your website. That means adding posts and pages and images, and things like that. You’re also going to get familiar with the WordPress dashboard, widgets and menus in Lesson 2.
3. Lesson 3: How to Change the Look of Your WordPress Website using WordPress Themes
   In Lesson 3, I’m going to show you how to change the look of your website with the use of Themes. This is going to be the presentation part of your website. I’m going to show you where you can find WordPress themes, how to install WordPress Themes and how to use them to make your website look beautiful.
4. Lesson 4: How to Extend WordPress Functionality Using WordPress Plugins
   In the fourth lesson, I’m going to show you how to add additional functionality to your website using WordPress plugins. WordPress can do a lot already, but it can do even more depending on what your needs are. There are WordPress plugins available for just about everything. I’m going to teach you where you can find WordPress plugins and how you can use them to extend your website. I’m also going to show you some of my favorite plugins that I use on just about every website as well.

Getting Started with your Domain Name

First things first, before we learn how to build a WordPress website, we want to choose a domain name. Now, what is the domain name? In case you’re not familiar, your domain name is your website address. My domain name is BetterLifeBlog.com and that can just be found right in the address bar. That’s what you type in the address bar when you’re trying to go directly to a website. This has no spaces and you can see what it looks like in the address bar.

 

Examples of Bad Domain Names

Now, when you’re choosing your domain name, you want to watch out for bad domain names. Here are a couple of funny examples of bad domain names.

• ITScrap.com (itscrap.com looks like “it’s crap” .com)
• TeachersTalking.org (teacherstalking.org looks like “teacher stalking”)
• TherapistFinder.com (therapistfinder.com looks like “the rapist finder”)

Tips for Choosing a Good Domain Name

Here are some tips for choosing a good domain name.

• Choose something that describes you.
  You want to make sure that it’s going to describe your website or business.
• Keep it short.
  I recommend that you keep it to 2-3 words maximum.
• Easy to spell. Avoid numbers and hyphens.
  You want it to be easy to spell and you want to avoid using numbers and hyphens and things like that if somebody is telling a friend about your website, you want them to be able to communicate that easily and quickly.
• How does it look in all lowercase?
  Avoid bad domain names by checking how it looks in al lowercase. As we just went over the examples of the bad domain names you want to make sure to check how your domain name looks in all lowercase. So that’s just something to consider.
• Is it memorable?
  You want to ensure it is a memorable domain name.
• Avoid Trademarks or Registered Names
  Finally, you want to make sure and avoid any trademarks or registered names unless you own the trademark or registered name.

Domain Registration and Hosting Setup

I’ve used a lot of hosting companies in the past. I’ve used Go Daddy, Just host, Media Temple, and Host Gator. They all have their pluses and minuses but I’ve researched what I believe to be the best hosting company overall and that company is Blue Host.

You can get both your domain name and your hosting with blue host. They have 24/7 support. They’re very reasonably priced. About half the price of all the ones I’ve used and they have excellent service, so I highly recommend them and if you want to go ahead and get started and sign up, you can visit:

BetterLifeBlog.com/BlueHost

Note: This is my affiliate link. I do get a small commission when anybody signs up using my link. However, I just want to make it clear that I think it’s a good company and I recommend it regardless. So, if you find this tutorial useful and helpful and you want to say thank you and you want to go through my link, I would definitely appreciate it.

And if you want to use another host, that would work just fine as well. However, in this tutorial that we’re going to go ahead and use the Blue Host to setup our website.

Blue Host Sign Up

Ok guys, so you’re going to want to go to BetterLifeBlog.com/BlueHost if you want to sign up with Blue Host using my affiliate link and you want to click on the big green button that says “Get Started Now.”

 

Select Your Plan

There are 3 plans. I do think the basic plan is sufficient for most websites. Unless you plan on having a huge website that will require a lot of data and a lot of extra features, just go ahead and choose the basic one for now. Click the green select button.

 

Find an Available Domain

Then you want to sign up for your domain name. If you are registering your domain name with Blue Host, use the option on the left side. If you already have a domain name that has been registered elsewhere, you can click over to the right side and type that in.

 

Create Account, Choose Package and Payment

Then we’re going to just create our account. You want to just go ahead and fill out this basic information. Then scroll down a little bit to get package information. You do have to pay in advance for either 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, or 5 years and so you can just go ahead and choose the plan that best suits you. You do get a discount the longer you are ready to set up so make that decision based on what your needs are.

 

You can also add on things like Domain Privacy Protection site back up Pro which are really good features and you could just click to learn more information about each of these additional features and then of course you want to go and put your credit card information, read their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and then click “submit” and then you will receive an email with some information on how to login.

 

Once you get the confirmation email, click on it and then I’m going to show you how to actually set up your WordPress website.

Sign into your Blue Host CPanel Account

OK so now that we’ve signed up for Blue Host, the next thing you want to do would you want to go into your control panel and you want to log in using the information that they provided in your confirmation email. Another way you can access this is either by going to Blue Host and just clicking “log in”. Or you can go to your domain directly,

yourdomain.com/cPanel

Hit Enter and then it’ll prompt you to login from there. This is page is called the Control Panel. It’s got all kinds of stuff in here (for example, you can set up an email address with your new domain, like he***@yo********.com).

For now we’re going to focus on installing WordPress.

Scroll until you find a section that says “website” and an icon that says “install WordPress”. Just go ahead and click on that.

 

Installing Wordpress

And then you’re going to want to go ahead and click on the green Get Started button down below. OK so from here it says to select the domain where you want to install word press. Just go ahead and choose the one that says http://www.yourdomain.com

Go ahead and choose the basic domain and then click next and then you’re going to want to give your website a a Title. You can choose a username but it gives you your email address by default. You could leave your email address the same as well and for your password, just make sure it’s something that’s secure because you don’t want anybody being able to guess your password. Just going to make sure that you’re not installing over something else. If this is a brand-new, account you have nothing to worry about.

Also make sure you read the terms and services agreement. And then you just want to go ahead and click “Install” and it’s just setting everything up. So right now what it’s doing is installing all the WordPress files, installing the database, basically automatically doing all the hard work for you. This process generally takes a few minutes so just be patient and it will let you know as soon as the installation is complete.

OK, so now that the installation is complete, you just want to go to your homepage, and just check to make sure that you see a page that looks a little something like this. This basically means that Word press is installed and in the next video, I’m going to show you how to login to your admin panel and how to add some content in here. So stay tuned.

Your website has a coming soon page that looks like this: