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How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Seven

Donna — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:08:30 +0000

In Part 6 of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas, you installed WordPress, and were rewarded with a site that is ready to go. It, unfortunately, is an ugly site, and no one wants an ugly site. So today’s lesson is a fun one. Let’s beautify the site and give it some personality – hopefully a bit of yours. You are going to find and use a pre-made theme. There are thousands of them available. The process is straightforward.

Find a theme you like and download it.
Upload it to your blog’s theme directory.
Tell WordPress you wish to use that theme.
Done. Enjoy your new beautiful web site.

I recently made note of what I believe are the best free GPL WordPress themes available. However, there are thousands of choices, so spend the day browsing through them over at themes.wordpress.net. This is a fun chore. I will often take a few hours out of my day just to browse the newest themes. So go find one you like, download it (all are free), and then come back here for detailed instructions on how to upload it and use it for your own blog.

Once you’ve downloaded your new theme, unzip it. If you don’t have a program that can unzip the files, go download and install any of the free zip file programs that PC World recommends.

Now, that it is unzipped, you need to upload the theme folder and all of its contents to your blog’s themes directory. Once again, you’ll go to your site’s control panel (www.yourdomain.com/cpanel) as directed in the email you received from your hosting company, log in, and choose File Manager.

You’ll then choose the public_html folder, by clicking on the little folder picture next to public_html.

Now, you’ll click on the folder next to wp-content, and the folder next to themes, which will take you to the themes directory. This is where you’ll be uploading your new theme folder. Click on the Upload Files link.

Browse your computer for the theme folder you just downloaded and unzipped. Click on Upload and wait until the entire folder and all of its contents have been uploaded to your blog’s theme directory.

Now log into your WordPress admin, by going to www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin. Click on Presentation. Look for the theme you just uploaded in the list of Available Themes, click on it, and you are done. Go to www.yourdomain.com to see your brand new, beautiful site.

Let’s do one final thing to our new WordPress blog before we begin writing content. Log in to your admin (www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin), and click on Options. Now click on Permalinks. Select name and date based, and click on the Update Permalink Structure button. Scroll down, and you’ll see a bunch of gobbledygook code listed. Grab all of that code by highlighting it and pressing Ctrl-C. Now open up Notepad on your computer and press Ctrl-V to paste that code into Notepad. Choose File / Save from Notepad’s menu, and type in “.htaccess” in the filename portion and save to your Desktop. DO NOT have .txt at the end. DO have the quotation marks in there. You want to type the quotes. “.htaccess”. Now upload this .htaccess file to the public_html directory in your Cpanel File Manager. Do so by logging into your cpanel (www.yourdomain.com/cpanel), choosing File Manager, clicking on the folder next to public_html, clicking the Upload Files link, browsing to the .htaccess file you just created on your desktop, and clicking the Upload button.

Whew! All done. Although there are a lot of things you can do with your WordPress blog to tweak it a little more, you don’t need to deal with any of that for now (or ever for that matter). If you want to learn more about WordPress, and everything you can do with your new blog, visit the official WordPress site. Otherwise, sit back, smile and get ready to begin your new career.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: applying themes, beautiful site, beautiful web site, Cpanel File Manager, HTML, make a living in your pajamas, PC World, WordPress, WordPress themes, www.yourdomain.com, www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin, www.yourdomain.com/cpanel, www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
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How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Six

Donna — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:22:02 +0000

The last two lessons on How To Make A Living in Your Pajamas may have seemed a bit overwhelming and technical, and I’m sorry for that. But you’ll be pleased to know that today’s lesson is very different.

Today, you’re going to install WordPress on your brand new site. What is WordPress? Well, it’s the coolest thing since ice. It’s a blogging system, that lets you easily become a blogger and have your very own web site without having to know how to actually make a blog or a website. How cool is that?

Ok, here are the super-easy instructions for installing WordPress.

Remember that email that HostGator* sent you with all of the information you need to know about your new hosting plan? Somewhere in that email is an instruction for going to your new control panel. It’s probably something like www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel/ . And the email also tells you what your username and password are to log into your control panel (CPanel).

So…do that. Go to the web address listed in the email for your control panel, and log in.

There? Good.

Now, click on the picture (icon) that is above the word Fantastico. See it? great.

You’ll see a long list of things you can install if you wish. One of the items in that list is WordPress. Click on it.

Now click on New Installation. Answer the questions it asks you. Don’t worry, these are easy questions. Here’s a sample picture. If I left something blank, you should too. And below the picture are some extra instructions for answering these questions.

Admin access data. Choose a username and password you would like to use in order to access the WordPress admin panel after installation is completed.

Base configuration. Type a nickname you would like to use. The nickname is used whenever you leave comments or write an entry on the blog, so choose something you don’t mind the public seeing. The admin email address is where information about the administration of the blog will be sent. Make sure to use an email address that you check regularly. Put in the site url and a short description of your new blog.

Email account configuration. Leave this blank.

Click on the Install WordPress button at the bottom.

Verify that the information you provided is correct and click on Finish installation.

Stand up, twirl around 3 times, sit down, and find your new WordPress blog installed and ready to go!

Admittedly, your brand new blog isn’t pretty at this point. Go ahead, look at it. Go to www.yourdomain.com. But we’ll make it pretty in the next lesson, and it will be easy. Ok?

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

Disclosure: Affiliate links may be used within this post for products I recommend. They in no way affect my judgement of said products, nor do they affect the price of the product.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brand new site, fantastico, Finish installation, hostgator, installing WordPress, make a living in your pajamas, New Installation, web address, WordPress, www.yourdomain.com, www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.