OK, time to get our hands dirty! Let’s create an empowered site.

About a month ago I met with a local publicist named Kelley Burrus. She came recommended to me for my publishing company, Dalton Publishing.

Kelley was shocked to learn that I build all of my author’s Websites as a courtesy (all Empowered By WordPress sites, by the way), and asked whether I did it for others as well. I told her I had been brainstorming a way to offer people such a service while also empowering them to maintain the site themselves, and she loved the idea. So when I first launched the Empowered By WordPress site, Kelley was the first one on board!

What I would like to do in this series is demonstrate, step-by-step, the process of empowering yourself through WordPress, using the evolution of Kelley’s site as an example.

Step One: Securing a Host and a Domain Name

Domain name registration vs. hosting account.

There tends to be a lot of confusion about the difference between a domain name registration, and a hosting account. I will attempt a simple explanation.

When you register a domain name, you are securing your right to exclusively use that domain name. Period. Registering a domain name does not get you anything but a domain name. In order to actually publish a Website using that domain name, you need a hosting account.

A hosting account is (in most instances) space you rent on a remote computer where your Website information is stored. You can use any hosting company you want to host your Website, all you need to do is “point” your domain name to it. If you register your domain name at the same time you sign up for your hosting account, however, you won’t need to worry about pointing your domain, that step will be done for you.

In Kelley’s case, she already had a registered domain name, but we needed to secure her a place to host her site.

Choosing a good hosting company that can host your WordPress site.

You can find the minimum requirements for a WordPress installation here. In a nutshell, it says that the host’s server must meet certain requirements in order for WordPress to operate properly. Chances are, if the host uses a Linux or a Unix server, it can accommodate WordPress - if it uses Windows NT, forget it!

WordPress recommends several hosting companies on their site, and I recommend one in particular called Westhost (see link on the left). I have been with Westhost since the beginning of Internet time, and recommend them to all of my clients. You can get a very large and feature-rich account with them that will accommodate WordPress for as little as $6.95/month, and they always offer the best in open source software, so you can be sure that all of your WordPress plugins are going to work properly without having to pay any more. They have fantastic tech support as well.

Here were the steps I sent to Kelley via email for her to set up her hosting account:

1. Go to my site: www.empoweredbywordpress.com and click on the link to
Westhost on the left sidebar of the site.

2. Once there, click on “personal plans”

3. click on “order now” under “personal starter”

4. choose “point your existing domain”* and enter your domain name in the space provided.

5. choose “personal starter” under “Hosting Plan” and the billing cycle you would like

6. the rest should be self explanatory - billing info and stuff

7. you will receive one email from them confirming the order (don’t forward that one to me), and a second email within 24 hours that will explain your hosting account to you, and will contain your user-name and password. This second email you will need to forward to me, so I can then set up WordPress on your site, and change your name servers.

* If you do not have a domain name already, you will choose “Register a New Domain” instead of “point your existing domain” in number 4 above. Be sure to check that the domain name is available before proceeding, though.

Kelley had no problem with this process, so we proceeded to “point” her existing domain to the proper host (Westhost, in this case). To properly point your domain to a host, you need to know what their “name servers” are. You can think of name servers as a host’s address. When you originally registered your domain, you should have received a user-name and password to access your domain registration account. Use these to gain access to your domain registration, and change the name servers to those of your new host.

It can take as long as 48 hours for new name servers to take effect on your domain, so now we wait…