How to Build a Wordpress Website
Wordpress is open source software designed as a blogging platform and can be configured to look like a a typical website. A Wordpress site is powered by PHP and MySQL, meaning that your content will be stored in MySQL database tables and pulled, formatted and displayed in a browser on demand using PHP. Using Wordpress for sites has become popular because of the ease of maintaining a site without the need for more expensive web site development tools. There are many available Wordpress plugins that can installed to simplify site development and maintenance. In addition, Wordpress has standard templates that can be easily installed as well as higher end templates that can be purchased for a nominal fee.
WordPress is an application that you can typically install from your hosting account, or, you can download Wordpress to your PC, unzip it using a standard zip/unzip program (or use Windows Vista which has an integrated unzip tool), upload the unzipped files to your web site using FTP, and then install Wordpress directly through the web.
If your current web host does not provide Wordpress as an application that can be installed from your site manager then it might be time to consider a better web hosting platform that provides popular application installs for your site. We provide a one click installation of Wordpress through our custom hosting plan.
If you find you need to install Wordpress, you first must decide if you want to install it in the web site root folder or in a sub-directory. If you are going to use WordPress as your main site, you'll want to install it in the root folder. If you want to install WordPress as a blogging platform and as an addition to an existing site, you'll want to install it in a sub-folder.
Manual installation of Wordpress requires that you create the MySQL database first and then install the Wordpress files manually before running the Wordpress install script. To create the database, you should be able to log into your site manager and create a new database. Again, if you can not do this through your web host, you should look into getting a more appropriate web hosting platform for your web site.
After you create the MySQL database to store your WordPress data, download Wordpress and unzip the files to a folder on your PC. You will find a wp-config-sample.php file that you must edit with your website configuration details and then save the configuration with the filename "wp-config.php". Upload the extracted files and your edited wp-config.php into a folder on your web site (name the folder wp-install or something similar). From your browser, enter the URL on your web site that points to the install php file to install WordPress.
To learn how to install a new Wordpress theme, see the article How to Upload a Theme to Wordpress.