Hey everyone,

I really hate to do this, but I need some grace. You see, this weekend I have been working on the Made to Crave webcast. I simply haven’t had any time to write posts every day nor write them ahead of time. I am supposed to be flying out today for a meeting tomorrow, but the big eastern storm is evidently moving in and having other plans. Say a quick prayer for me if you would — travelling if I do get to and writing if I don’t travel. I’ll go back and catch up these days that I miss.

Thanks so much for understanding!

WordPress has 2 sides. One side is what everyone sees when they visit your site. The other side is the administration side.

To login to your administration side, the url will be http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/

Bookmark it in your browser This is where you will be going to get to your dashboard. You’ll manage your entire site through the dashboard. The first time you go to that link it will redirect you to a login link. Put in your username and password that was determined during the installation and save it in your browser if you’d like. Then when you visit the link again, it will take you directly to your dashboard.

I know. I know. You are ready to get to the fun stuff about how to make your blog look pretty right? But I know you have some incredible stories to share and the last thing I want to happen to you is for you to lose all that you’ve written.

Manually backing up WordPress

The first method is better than nothing. Seriously. To backup your WordPress php files, you’ll need an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client (software that runs on your computer). I recommend downloading and using FileZilla. You need the client software only — not the server software. Your web host should have sent you the information you need to login via FTP. It’s most likely the same as the login username and password as your control panel. The host is generally ftp.yourdomainname.com.

Once you put that information into FileZilla, you’ll see a list of the files on your computer on the left side and a list of the files on your web host on the right side. If you were to click and drag a file from the left side to the right side it would upload that file to your web server. If you click and drag a file from the right side to the left side, you would be downloading that file to your computer.

Make a special folder on your computer and open that folder on the left side. On the right side you will see a public_html folder. Double-click to open that folder. Here you will see the php files that make WordPress run. The only thing that you need to make sure you backup is the wp-content folder. You can right-click that and select download or just drag it from the right window to the left window. It will go through a long process but it’s copying the files from your web server to your computer. Everything else can really be replaced if the files were corrupted, but there are some things in the wp-content folder we’ll get to in a few days that have to be backed up.

To backup your database, you can install the WP-DB-Backup Plugin. I’ll be going over how to install plugins, but just know this one is pretty crucial. Once you install it, you can immediately download a copy of your database or you can setup a schedule and have a copy emailed to you. I recommend setting up a schedule as it’s well, scheduled and you don’t have to think about it. How often you have the database emailed to you depends on how much you blog. If you blog 5 days a week and would be sad if you lost a week’s worth of posts, setup to email you daily. If you blog once a week or so, have it email you once a week. I’d try to keep at least 3 database backups in your email or on your computer. Things can happen to those files, and it’s better to have a couple of back-ups of back-ups.

Automated Backups

I usually don’t recommend paying for plugins, but BackupBuddy has been one of the best purchases I’ve made to date. It will make a backup file containing your database and all the WordPress files that make your site run. You can have it automatically backup your site on a schedule as well as have it email you those backups. It definitely beats having to backup your site manually!

* Note for Blogger users

I hope you’ll forgive me for this, but I feel it’s important. If you are still on Blogger: go login, go to Settings -> Basic -> Export Blog. Save this file to your computer. Do it now. Seriously. If Blogger were to crash and lose your stuff (and are they really going to care? They provide you with a free service), you might just be sick to your stomach — literally.

Check out today’s posts at A Woman Inspired Conference. All of the bloggers who are participating are linked there and you can jump to their blog and back. Or go directly to their blog to catch up on days past:

Amy Bayliss {Cajun Inspired} : 31 Days of Heart Matters

{A Martha’s Heart} : 31 Days of Prayer

Karin {Mommy Matters} : 31 Days of Intentional Parenting

Jenny {867-53oh9} : 31 Days of Social Media

Karen {Simply A Musing} : 31 Days of Praise

Dawn {My Home Sweet Home} : 31 Days of Encouragement

There are basically 2 parts to WordPress. The first part contains the WordPress application files. These files are what’s included in the .zip file you may download from WordPress.org or the files you see when you log in with your FTP client (not sure what an FTP client is? We’ll go over that later!). The WordPress files are PHP files (meaning they have a .php extension). The second part of your blog is your database. WordPress interacts with a MySQL database to store information about your blog. This may sound like I’m getting too technical here, but hang with me.

PHP Files

PHP is a scripting language. These are files that you can open on your computer in a text editor (like Notepad). These files when opened in a text editor, will most likely look like a bunch of gibberish to you. When those same files are on a web server, the web server actually goes through the lines of gibberish and ends up displaying a pretty web page. For this reason, you can’t “run” WordPress on your computer (that’s why you need a web server).

MySQL Database

So, now you know under your web hosting account, you’ll see a bunch of PHP files. These PHP files will tell the web server to connect to a database server — to your database. When that connection is made, the PHP files will pull information out of the database and display it on the web page. Your entries — the headlines, the content and things like the date, are stored inside database fields. Think of the database as a big container. Inside that big container are individual little containers that hold a title, the text, and other information about your blog and blog posts.

This is most important to understand when we talk about backing up your blog (coming in a few days). If you look at the WordPress PHP files, that’s only half of your blog and not even the most important half. The WordPress PHP files can be reloaded by downloading the files again from WordPress.org. If you lose what you’ve written — the stuff that’s saved in your database — well, you can’t get that back unless you have a backup of the database.

Check out today’s posts at A Woman Inspired Conference. All of the bloggers who are participating are linked there and you can jump to their blog and back. Or go directly to their blog to catch up on days past:

Amy Bayliss {Cajun Inspired} : 31 Days of Heart Matters

{A Martha’s Heart} : 31 Days of Prayer

Karin {Mommy Matters} : 31 Days of Intentional Parenting

Jenny {867-53oh9} : 31 Days of Social Media

Karen {Simply A Musing} : 31 Days of Praise

Dawn {My Home Sweet Home} : 31 Days of Encouragement

One-click installs

If your host has a 1-click install, log into the cpanel (control panel) area. Your host should have given you a link in your welcome email along with a username and password to log in. If you already have your domain name pointed at the web host, your control panel area url will be http://domainname.com/cpanel

Look for Fantastico in your control panel. Click the button to open Fantastico and select WordPress as the installation. Select which domain you want WordPress installed on and leave the directory blank to install your blog at the root (meaning just your domainname.com will show WordPress).

Pick a different username for your WordPress use than admin. Admin used to be the default and can easily be hacked into and your site could be messed up. Choose a good password too — try using numbers for vowels in words that are special to you. For example, l1s8 is a good start with the number 1 replacing letter i’s and the number 8 replacing a’s.

WordPress Easy Install

Believe it or not, WordPress.org has some wonderful documentation in the Codex. The instructions for an easy install are here. If you want to try your hand at doing a manual installation, read through the instructions here carefully. I’ll be going over the parts of WordPress over the next few days that may help some of the instructions make sense if you want to wait

Leave me a comment here or send me an email if you have questions about the installation.

Check out today’s posts at A Woman Inspired Conference. All of the bloggers who are participating are linked there and you can jump to their blog and back. Or go directly to their blog to catch up on days past:

Amy Bayliss {Cajun Inspired} : 31 Days of Heart Matters

{A Martha’s Heart} : 31 Days of Prayer

Karin {Mommy Matters} : 31 Days of Intentional Parenting

Jenny {867-53oh9} : 31 Days of Social Media

Karen {Simply A Musing} : 31 Days of Praise

Dawn {My Home Sweet Home} : 31 Days of Encouragement

Your domain name needs to be registered somewhere. Some web hosts offer a free domain name with your account or you can have your domain name registered somewhere like GoDaddy. Although I do not agree with GoDaddy’s advertising tactics, they do have good prices and decent control panel.

Keep in mind your domain name does not necessarily have to be your blog name. The domain name for this site here is lisaboyd.com but I can name my blog itself whatever I’d like. The advantage to that is you can change your blog name any time you want. The disadvantage is people would have to remember 2 things – one, my domain name and the other is the name of my blog (to know they want to read it again).

Try to get a domain name that’s your name (especially if you are an author or speaker) or easy to remember. I know that can be difficult because so many are taken. Put some serious thought behind it though. Depending on your web hosting account you may have more than one domain name pointing to the same place. I have the domain name zeteosolutions.com also but it will bring you right here.

The main thing you’ll need to worry about with the domain name is the name servers. When you sign-up for your web hosting, your host will tell you what domain name servers you should use. It will look like nsXX.domainname.com. These will need to be put in where you have your domain name registered at. This will tell everyone which host your files are stored at to display.

Check out today’s posts at A Woman Inspired Conference. All of the bloggers who are participating are linked there and you can jump to their blog and back.

Or go directly to their blog to catch up on days past:

Amy Bayliss {Cajun Inspired} : 31 Days of Heart Matters

{A Martha’s Heart} : 31 Days of Prayer

Karin {Mommy Matters} : 31 Days of Intentional Parenting

Jenny {867-53oh9} : 31 Days of Social Media

Karen {Simply A Musing} : 31 Days of Praise

Dawn {My Home Sweet Home} : 31 Days of Encouragement

To have full control over your site, you’ll need a web hosting account. This is a place where your files will live 24/7 so everyone can view your site. There’s typically a monthly fee with a discount for paying yearly. Fees can range from entry level $4.95 a month to $150 a month for sites with high traffic.

Here are some terms you’ll see when looking for a web host:

Disk Space: This is like a hard drive in your computer. The amount of space that each file takes up uses disk space. All web hosts offer plenty of disk space nowadays. The only thing to be really careful with is uploading high resolution pictures (like right off your fancy camera). We’ll go over how best to save pictures for showing them on your blog later in the series.

Bandwidth: Imagine your content as water and a pipe between your web host and others that want to access your information. If the pipe is small, a smaller number of people will be able to access the water. The bigger the pipe, the more people can access your content at one time. That’s bandwidth. This is measured by the file size of every part of your site (images, code, content). Some hosts limit bandwidth based how much you use per month.

Control Panel: Most hosts use cPanel software for their control panel. Some use their own control panel software, but all of them allow you to setup and change certain things on your hosting account. What if you wanted to add an email address? You could do that in your control panel. Want to add another domain name (site)? You can do that as well in your control panel.

1-click script installs: Most hosts also have 1-click script installs that will install WordPress.org for you and setup the other necessary parts so you don’t have to. They also provide installs for other software that you could use on your site if you wanted to be adventurous. One of the benefits of having your own hosting!

I recommend Host Gator*. They have a Hatchling Plan that gives you a single domain, unlimited disk space, and unlimited bandwidth for $6.95/month (if you pre-pay for a year). The next plan up is the Baby Plan that gives you unlimited domains, unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth for $9.95/month (if you pre-pay for a year).

I also do hosting for some of my clients who don’t want to mess with their own hosting account. You can contact me for more information.

* This is an affiliate link. If you prefer, go straight to http://www.hostgator.com/

Be sure to check out the others participating in 31 Days of Ministry Online.

There are 2 options for using WordPress. The first option is to setup a blog on WordPress.com. Your blog url will become a subdomain of WordPress (ie. MyWonderfulBlog.wordpress.com). The second option includes download the WordPress software and installing it under your own web hosting account. This will use your own domain name (ie. www.MyWonderfulBlog.com).

First let’s talk about money. I know it’s an issue with everyone. Many people start a blog on Blogger because it is free. WordPress.com is free as well but you are limited by what you can do with it. In order to do some customizations on WordPress.com, you’d have to pay some small fees. Using WordPress.org software, you only have to pay a small fee for the web hosting. I think you can have a really nice website setup for a small amount a money.

Using WordPress.com:

• completely free (limited on themes and plugins)
• restricted with some of the things you can customize and do
• subdomain of their site (advertising for them)
• premium features require payment
  • remove their ads ($29.97/year)
  • use own domain ($12 – $17/year)
  • custom css – to change colors, layout, etc ($14.97/year)

Using WordPress.org:

• software is free
• you retain ownership of your blog (images, copy, etc.)
• complete control over plugins (what your blog can do)
• complete control over themes (what your blog looks like)
• costs involved
  • web hosting (~$60/year)
  • domain name registration ($9.95/year)

WordPress.org can be expanded as you want to grow your site. I call them sites because WordPress.org is more of a content management system — you don’t have to use the blog function if you don’t want to blog. You can have an entire site setup in WordPress (either .org or .com).

If you don’t understand some of the terms I used above (plugins, themes, css, etc.) don’t worry! I’ll be explaining more about these as we journey forth. The rest of my tutorials will be referencing WordPress.org software.

Be sure to check out my other companions for additional information on 31 Days of Ministry Online.