Hi, and thanks for visiting my site.

I am a Wordpress fanatic, and I hope I can convince you to be one too – if you’re not already.

The site’s in it’s very early days, so there’s not much on it at the moment, but expect it to expand rapidly over the coming weeks and months.

Sign up to my newsletter – I’m giving away some great Sales Page Templates for Wordpress immediately, and will follow up with some more superb free gifts, many of which you could find for sale on other websites. I’m certain that you won’t be disappointed. But do get in quick as I am limiting these gifts to my earliest and most loyal subscribers.

And if there’s anything you want me to cover, drop me an email through the ‘Contact Us‘ page, and I’ll try and oblige.

Thanks very much.

Technorati Tags: sales page, salespage, templates, Wordpress

I first looked at Wordpress some years ago. I’d heard that it was a great way to get a website online.

I installed a test site, played about with it for a bit, before finally deciding that it was CRAP! To this day, I really don’t know why I came to this conclusion. I can only say that I was TOTALLY and UTTERLY as wrong as wrong can be.

I went through spending a small fortune on Dreamweaver, XSitePro and others (don’t get me wrong – I would highly recommend these programs in the right circumstances), before returning to Wordpress sometime last year.

How things had changed. Wordpress is now the only website software I use for my own purposes, and for my clients websites.

The range of templates and plugins available is massive.

You can produce a simple ‘blog’, or a fully blown business site with e-commerce, membership and other facilities – and easier and quicker than any other software out there.

I am now a Wordpress ‘groupie’ – I love it! … and now, over the coming weeks and months, I’d like to show you everything I know about it.

Technorati Tags: blog, word press, Wordpress, wordpress tuition

Before you go any further you need a domain name.

Choosing the right name can be extremely important if you are a commercial business and are wanting to attract visitors through the search engines organic (free) listings.

• In most instances, a good name would be in the form of a word or phrase that people are searching for, rather than the company name – eg floridacarsales.com not jbloggscars.com
• A Dot Com (.com) domain extension is by far the best to use if you are doing business worldwide, regardless of which country you are based in, or in the USA. If you live in a particular country, and will only be doing business in that country, then a domain name with that country’s extension should be used (eg .co.uk)

There are hundreds of companies where you can register your domain.

The one that I personally use and recommend is Namecheap.

Once your domain is registered you need to enter the DNS settings. What this does, in effect, is to let your domain registrars know the location of your website. These settings will be given to you by your Hosting company.

Technorati Tags: DNS, domain, domain name, domain name registration

Over the years I have used a number of Hosting Companies, before settling on the one I now consider the best, and as you may have guessed from the banner below, that company is Hostgator.

They seem to have all the requirements you will ever need (and more!), are competitively priced, and customer service and support are very good. And of course they use the standard CPanel, and therefore WordPress installation is completely automatic.

Go and have a look at their website and see a full list of features. One of the benefits of using Hostgator is that you are not tied to a contract. You can pay monthly, and cancel at any time. Alternatively you can pay for longer periods and get a discount on the monthly price. And if you use the above link and coupon code, you get the first month for 1 cent!

Hostgator – HIGHLY recommended for your hosting

Technorati Tags: cpanel, fantastico, hostgator, Hosting

There’s a couple of ways to install Wordpress – either automatically or manually. Either way is quite simple, but obviously the easiest is the automatic option. If you use a host that uses cpanel – which most do nowadays – you will need to find and click the ‘Fantastico’ icon. This will open a new window showing the list of available automatic installation programs on the left hand menu. Find and click the ‘Wordpress’ option. From the next window click ‘New installation’.

The next window requires you to set up the following:

• Install on domain
  This will be the domain you wish your site to be installed to.
• Install in Directory
  If you wish to install to the root directory (meaning that you want your wordpress site to appear when you visit www.yourdomain.com) then leave this blank. If you want to install it to a different directory, enter the name of that directory here (for example, enter ‘blog’ in this text box, and your site will be accessed at www.yourdomain.com/blog)
• Administrator username & Password
  These next two boxes are for you to enter the username and password required to access the ‘backend’ of your site – i.e. the admin area where you will add pages, posts and catgories; enable plugins and enter their settings; and enter other settings and details. Make sure that you use a password that will ensure the security of your site.
• Admin nickname, Email, Site name and Description
  These are pretty self-explanatory. Just bear in mind that the Site name and Description will appear in your sites header graphic as the Title of the site, and a sub-header or tagline, respectively, so pick these carefully and make sure they relate to the content of your site, as they will help in the Search Engine Optimization of your site. These can be changed at a later stage in the admin of your site so don’t worry too much.

When you’re happy with the details click the ‘Install WordPress’ button, which leads to a new window showing some details of the installation. Click the ‘Finish installation’ button and that’s it! Ready to go.

Technorati Tags: cpanel, fantastico, install, tuition, wordpress installation