Wordpress Lets You Do That?

The standard Wordpress format is pretty cool to start with, and it’s even free which is amazing. However we want our blogs to do even cooler stuff, so that they not only look nice and pretty, but do some pretty tricky stuff that will help you out as an author, the end user, and most importantly, help us in terms of SEO so that Google demands to put you on its front page.

The type of things we can upload to our server where our Wordpress blog lives, are things such as Themes and Plugins. You’ll get pretty used to these two things and learn to love them.

A theme is a design or layout that is made specifically to work with Wordpress. There are thousands of free themes hanging around on the Internet waiting for you to use. If you want a customised theme to suit you or your business, then it is pretty easy and inexpensive to get one made up on somewhere such as getafreelancer or Elance.

Plugins are backend pieces of code that are designed to do different things but we will get into that later. For now, we need to know how to get these things on to your server.

FTP, or File Transfer Protocol for the geeks among us. A technical term that really says put something from my computer on to a remote computer (server in this case). Very easy to do once you have done it a few times.

First you will need an FTP Client (software) to do this. If you’re a real tech, then you can do this through Windows, but if you are like me, use a separate program designed to do FTP. A fantastic client around at the moment is FileZilla, an open source program (free) that is worth its weight in gold. CuteFTP is another, and if you’re a designer, then you may choose to use Dreamweaver.

Once you have your FTP client, you have to punch in the setting for your server, such as root directory, user name and of course password. Hit connect and if everything is OK you’ll connect to the remote server and be able to see in real time the entire file layout of your blog.

Now as this is a blog, personally I do not get the entire remote site and make a copy on my own computer like I would if it was a static website, but you can, especially if you want to back up the site. The simple thing to do here is to drag your theme and plugin files from your computer and drop them to the correct folders on the remote site. The correct folder is usually found in /wp-content/. Do this for as many themes and plugins that you may want to upload.

It may sound difficult (or maybe it’s the way i explained it that has confused you), but it really is easy once you have done it a couple of times. Uploading is not just limited to these things either. Images, webforms and documents can all be uploaded just like a normal web site.

Soon, we’ll look at what to do with these things that you have uploaded and how to use them.

First things first. There are a couple of ways to host your Wordpress blog. You can use the services of a free Wordpress host easily enough but as we know free things usually have their downfalls. By hosting on a free host your blog is at the mercy of their rules, and if your blog happens to go outside of these rules your blog can be shut down without warning. With some free hosts this can be something as simple as putting in an affiliate link. They can change the rules overnight so be warned.

The alternative to this is of course have your own host and install Wordpress yourself. Hosting these days is very inexpensive and there are some excellent services that allow you to host unlimited domains with your package. When you have a lot of blogs and websites this could save you a lot of money.

The majority of hosts use a backend platform called C Panel. C Panel is very easy to use and work with, and makes installing Wordpress a breeze as it does it all for you. Your hosting company will tell you where in C Panel you can find the install application, but usually this is found in the Fantastico script library. You simply choose  where you want the Wordpress install directed to, and it automatically does the rest. If your site is hosted with a Plesk panel, then I would suggest that you speak to the server administrator for assistance:)

If you will be using the  domain name as your blog, then you would point it to the root folder. If you want to make the blog a sub-directory, then you just type in what you want it called, and point it to that.

You can install more than one version of Wordpress on your server, it is just a case of repeating the install process.

Once you have done your install you will be automatically emailed your login details for later reference.

Now that we have a nice shiny new version of Wordpress on our server, we want to start making some modifications. To do this we will need an FTP client, and that will be the topic of the next post.