Wordpress is a popular blogging software package freely available to anyone. Many hosting companies provide one click installation of a wordpress blog but some traditional hosting service may not. Installing Wordpress isn’t as difficult as you may think. You’ll need to at least know how to FTP to your server in order to complete this installation. We’ll also assume you have no web-based administration or shell access.

First you’ll want to download the latest version of Wordpress to your desktop. You can download Wordpress from here. After you download Wordpress, extract the files from the zip folder. Normally we would upload the zip file to your hosting service but we have to assume you don’t have shell access or a web based admin tool to unzip the files from. Now open your favorite FTP program and upload all the Wordpress files to the root of your web folder. If you want the blog to be your main site you’ll want to uploads all the files inside the Wordpress folder. If you want your blog to be in a subfolder on an existing site, just upload the Wordpress folder that was extracted from the Wordpress download, and then rename the folder to something like “blog” or whatever once the upload is complete.

Now we can setup Wordpress. Your hosting provider should have given you the IP, username and password for your Mysql database and you’ll need this before continuing. Normally the IP/Hostyou’re your database is localhost. Goto http://www.yoursitedomain.com/ or http://www.yoursitedomain.com/blog or where ever you uploaded the Wordpress files. You should now be able to walk through the Wordpress installation step by step.

Once you configure Wordpress you’ll want to make a few extra changes. First upload a file called .htaccess and make it fully writable ( chmod 777 .htaccess ). Next, go into the wp-content folder and create a folder called uploads and give it full access ( chmod 777 uploads ). You need to create the uploads folder if you plan on adding pictures and media to your blog posts.

Themes:
To install theme, simply unzip a theme file and upload it to the wp-content/themes folder. Then from the Appearance menu on the right in your Wordpress Dashboard, you can select the theme to have it activated.

Plug-ins:
Plug-ins are done the same way as themes except they need to be uploaded to the wp-content/plugins folder.

Tips:
You can always get to the admin/dashboard for your blog by typing in your blog address http://www.myblogaddress.com/wp-admin.

You may be asked to create a file called wp-config.php, don’t worry, just create the file on your computer as asked and then upload it to where you uploaded the other Wordpress files.