Starting Your Own Blog Part III - 8 Steps To Get Your Self-Hosted Blog Up And Running

In this post, I will take you through 8 steps you need to take to set up your own self hosted blog. When you have a self hosted blog, you own your domain name and get to choose where to “park” your blog (i.e. which hosting service to go with). There are many more advantages as well, and I have written about the pros and cons of free and self hosted blogs in an earlier post. If you have any questions about any of this, please feel free to contact me. This is a long post, and if you would prefer to have it emailed to you, just let me know.

To get your self hosted blog up and running, this is what you need to do.

1. Buy a domain name
I always buy my domain names at www.GoDaddy.com. Their prices are good, customer service is great and they are there for you 24 hours a day. Whenever I have had issues that were tricky to resolve, they kept working on them for me even after we hung up and kept checking in via email to let me know how it was going.

Once you get to their site, you’ll see a window where you can type in the domain name you want to use. If it’s available, you’ll see a green checkmark and you’re all set to add it to your shopping cart and check out. If not, you’ll see a red cross and they will tell you it’s already taken. You’ll see a list of different variations available (.net, .mobi., .biz etc.) and on the right hand side of the screen, a list of suggestions for altering the name slightly by adding different pre and suffixes. Keep searching until you find a name you like. It’s not as easy as it used to be – sometimes it feels like there are no available domain names left – but keep at it, you’ll find something you like.

Should you choose .com, .net., org., .info or all of them?
If you can find a domain name you like with a .com, buy it. That’s still the top domain and the one people remember. If I had to choose another one (say your business name is available, but not as a .com), I would go with .net. To me, .org sounds like a non-profit, and .info, .biz., .us etc. haven’t really caught on yet. If neither .com or .net is available, try adding a pre or suffix to your business name and see if that’s available. It can be tempting to buy all variations (.com, .net etc.) if they’re available, so that nobody else can set up a site with your business name, but I personally think that that’s overkill. One is enough.

2. Get a hosting plan
Once you have your domain name, it’s time to find a hosting service where you can park your blog. I use HostGator and have been very happy with them. They have three different levels of hosting: Hatchling, Baby, and Business. If you plan on having only one blog hosted with them, go with the Hatchling plan. It’s only $4.95 – $8.95/month and includes all that you need. The $4.95 price is if you buy a 3-year plan up front, and the $8.95 is if you prefer being billed month to month. The $8.95 option also has a $5 setup charge, but if you don’t want to commit to a 3-year plan, I would suggest starting with the 1-year plan, which breaks down to $6.95/month (and no setup fee). They usually have rebates and other offers too, so look around on their front page. Right now, there is a winter special of 20% off.

If you have or plan on having more than one blog, go with Baby ($7.95/month) or Business ($12.95/month). Why would you have more than one? Well, for example, if you do several different things, you could have one for your massage business and another one for your hobby or other business.

3. Change the nameservers
As soon as you’ve signed up with HostGator, they send you a welcome email with the names of their two nameservers in it. Keep this, you’ll need it. The next step is to log into your account on www.GoDaddy.com , click on Domain Manager (it’s in the menu on the left hand side) and when your domain name comes up, click on it. You will get to a page with all the info about your domain, and on the left hand side, you’ll see Nameservers. Click on the Manage link next to it. This brings up a new window – select “I host my domains with another provider” and in the 2 boxes called Nameserver 1 and Nameserver 2, copy and paste the 2 nameservers HostGator sent you (instead of the 2 default ones that are already there) and click OK. It can take a few hours before this goes into effect, so you can log out of GoDaddy altogether once you’ve done this.

4. Select a theme for your blog
This is a fun part. You will need to find a theme to use for your blog (the theme is the look and the basic bones of the blog; a blog template). There are thousands of free themes available on the internet. Try to find one that is SEO optimized and widgetized. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and will help your blog’s ranking. Do a Google search for seo optimized wp theme and you will find plenty. Widgetized means that it has widgets – little chunks of code that are easy to work with for those not familiar with html. My sidebars here on Animal Massage Guide consist of widgets. I’ll tell you how to work with those in a later post, just know that you’re better off with a theme that has them than one that does not.

Once you find a theme you like, download it to your computer, preferably to your desktop so it’s easy to find.

5. Install WordPress on your blog
By now, hopefully the nameserver change has taken effect. You’ll know it did if you can log into your cpanel. The cpanel is the control center of the inner workings of your blog and you log into it by typing www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel in your URL window (obviously yourdomainname needs to be replaced with whatever your domain name is).

If the nameservers have been changed, you will get a pop up window where you log in (with the username and password you created when you registered at HostGator) and end up at your Control Panel.

Scroll down on the page until you see a heading called Software/Services. In that box, you’ll see a blue smiley face called Fantastico De Luxe. Click on that. In the next window, you want to select WordPress from the menu on the left hand side of the page. This takes you to a new window, where you need to click on New Installation (leave the box next to “Install in directory” blank). That will take you to yet another screen where you need to fill in the domain name, username, password, nickname, your email adress and your sitename (it will say yourdomainname.com but you want to change that to Your Domain Name. This is the name of your blog that will show up in the header). Then click on Install WordPress. A new screen will come up where you need to click on “Finish Installation”. You’ll get to another screen where you have the option of having the details of the installation emailed to you. It’s a good idea to do that, so fill in your email address in the window provided and click “Send E-mail”. That’s it! Once that’s done, you can make sure it worked by going into your browser and typing in your domain (www.yourdomainname.com) in the URL window. If all went according to plan, you will see your blog (with the default theme “Kubrik”).

6. Install your theme on your blog
Unless you like Kubrik and want to keep that, the next step is to install the theme you downloaded in step 4. You will need an FTP client (File Transfer Protocol) to do so, and if you don’t have one already on your computer, I suggest downloading Filezilla. There are others, Filezilla is free, and I really like it. So go to http://filezilla-project.org/, select the option you need (there are several versions for Mac and Windows) and download it to your computer. Unzip it and open the program. You’ll see a window like one of these:

Connect to your site by typing in your domain name (www.yourdomainname.com) in the address (sometimes also called host) window, your username and password (for your site) and in port, put 21 and click Quickconnect. (Once you’ve connected with your site, you can save the settings to your file manager so you don’t have to type all this in again. To do so, go to File – Copy Connection to Site Manager and save.)

You will see two windows in Filezilla: One is your computer (on the left) and one is the directory of your blog (on the right). In the right hand window (your blog), find the folder called public_html and double click on it. Then look for a folder called wp_content and double click on that. You will see a few new folders and one of them is called themes. This is where we want to put your downloaded theme.

In the left hand window, find the folder with the theme you downloaded (make sure it’s unzipped, a zipped folder won’t work) and drag it over to the themes folder in you blog directory. You will see the files start transferring in the bottom window in Filezilla and once they’ve all transferred, you’re ready for the next step.

7. Activate your theme
Now, log into your blog. You do this by typing in your blog address and /wp-admin in the URL window (so it would be www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin) and enter the user name and password you used to set up wordpress in cpanel. This will bring you to your dashboard.

Go to Appearance (it’s in the menu on the left side of your blog). This brings you to a new window where you should see the theme you just uploaded under “Available Themes”. Click on it and you will get a preview window of how your blog would look with this theme. If you like it, click on Activate in the upper right hand corner. If you don’t, close the window, find a new theme, upload it and see how that looks.

Once you’ve activated your new theme, there are a few little housekeeping chores to do:

8. Settings
The first thing you want to do is to click on Settings (at the bottom of the left side menu) and in the General Settings, type in the title of your blog, your tagline (if you have/want one), the URL and address of your blog (unless it’s already there), your email address and your date & time format preferences. Click Save Changes.

Then, in the left hand menu, click on “Permalinks”. Select Custom Structure. In the window next to that option, type in /%postname%/. This will make sure your posts have nice and “clean” URLs (instead of things like MyDomainName.com/?p=123). Once you’ve done that, click Save Changes.

Click on “Privacy” and make sure your blog is set to be visible to everyone

Click on “Writing” and select the options you would like. They’re mostly a matter of preference, but one thing you want to make sure here is that your blog “pings” to the right places. Ping means that these sites will automatically be notified every time you add a new post or update your content. In the window under Update Services, you want to copy and paste the following list:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Click Save changes.

Click on “Reading”. Here you can select if you want your blog to show the latest post or if you would like a static first page, like on a website. The other options are pretty self explanatory, and once you’re done making selections, click Save Changes.

That’s it! You’re ready to start blogging!

In coming posts, I will write about how to publish pages and posts, install plugins, and talk about some useful tips and tricks.

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