Installing WordPress as your Podcasting Website Platform
The PodCraft Podcast: Series 3, Episode 2
In this episode we’re looking at installing WordPress. WordPress is the software that we’ll be using to run our podcasting website and, luckily for us, our hosting package makes it really easy to get it up and running. Listen to the episode to find out how to use cPanel to install the package quickly and easily.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode
To find the videos I discuss in the episode just go to the following links. The first one takes you to a free course that I run on LearnDen on installing a business website. I’ll be referring to a few of the the tutorials on that course during this series so it’s well worth signing up. Plus it’s totally free, so well worth the effort:
Listen to the Rest of the Series
You can find listen to the whole of Series 3 which guides you through setting up a peerless Podcasting website. Please do let me know what you think
Do you use WordPress for your Podcasting website? If not, what do you use? Let me know!
Transcription
Hey folks! I’m Colin Gray and this is PodCraft.
Hey folks and welcome to episode 3. This is Series 3 of PodCraft which is all about creating a peerless podcasting website. We’re taking you through step by step how to create a podcasting website which will work for you, grow your audience, and really make it easy for you to promote your content. So, this is episode 3 as I said and we’re on to now installing the podcasting platform. So, this is when we actually get the software installed on your hosting. Yesterday, we talked about domains and hosting, so you should be all setup with your hosting account. Now, we’re going to move on to installing the website itself. So, as our software platform, we’re going to be using a package called WordPress. Now, I have no doubt you’ve probably heard the WordPress. It’s a super popular piece of software, totally open source so it’s free to download, free to use, got a huge community around it, really powerful package and there’s actually a pretty large proportion of websites around the web that use WordPress. So, it’s one of the most popular platforms out there for building a website and that’s because it’s so easy to use and it’s so powerful and it just has so many add-ons as well. So, that’s part of what the series is all about. It’s how to create WordPress, how install WordPress and then all of the add-ons and plugins that you can use with WordPress to make a really effective podcasting website.
But, of course, first step is to actually get WordPress working. So, in this episode I’m just going to go through and explain how you install WordPress with absolutely no technical knowledge. You don’t need to be a web developer, you don’t need to be a web designer, you don’t even need to know much about technology at all to get WordPress working on your website to install it. And that’s assuming that you’ve gone with one of the options talked about yesterday on domains and hosting which is either HostGator or Bluehost. Now, many hosting packages outside of HostGator and Bluehost will also allow you to install WordPress really easily but I’ll go through just a full steps on using HostGator in particular because that’s kind of my main choice. But I’ll also give you some instructions for Bluehost as well, how to install WordPress on them. And don’t worry at all, like I said, it’s really super easy, quick and easy and the tools that HostGator provides to let you do this.
So, how do we go about this process? Well, just to explain a little bit about how web hosting and the admin aspects of your web hosting works. Now, once you sign up for your web hosting account, your web hosting company like HostGator for example or Bluehost will give you what they call a control panel. Now, control panels for websites lets you do all sorts of stuff such as setting up emails, such as installing softwares, such as statistics, all that kind of stuff as well as a whole lot more proper in-depth development types of stuff for websites. But, like I said, you don’t really need to know much about any of that stuff.
The main things that we’re going to use are the software installation to install WordPress really easily and you might want to do stuff like emails. So if you have signed up for a new domain, a new hosting account and you want to set yourself up an email on your new domain then you could use cpanel, their control panel, sorry for that. Now, the reason I slip and said cpanel is because cpanel is actually the software that HostGator uses to run its control panel. So, when I say control panel, I mean that kind of generic area whereby you can manage your website but actually software called cpanel is a control panel package. And HostGator and Bluehost both use a version of cpanel. Now, cpanel is really common, so once you get to know cpanel, you can generally manage a website on pretty much most hosting applications. Some might use a different one but the most common by far, I would say is cpanel. So, the way you access your cpanel is normally to type in your domain, so yourdomain.com/cpanel and that’s just spelling out as in C P A N E L and if you type that in, yourdomain.com/cpanel, that will generally take you straight to the login page for the cpanel software. You’ll type in your hosting account, username and password and then you’ll be taken into the cpanel itself. Now, feel free to have a look around inside the cpanel, just have a look at the types of tools are available to you. There’s a few different things in there, like I said, some that are very easy to use, some that you will be using quite soon and others that you’ll never actually have to have a look at, and lots of stuff in there really just for proper web developers, so lots of stuff in there that you can ignore. But the main thing is, don’t be intimidated by it. The stuff in here, as long as you don’t mess around things you don’t really know what it does then you’re not really going to do any damage. You’re really just going to be looking at the emails, the software installation.
So, how do we do this? How do we install WordPress? Well, cpanel, like I said, makes it nice and easy for you. If you scroll down in your cpanel and find what is called Quick Install. Now, Quick Install is in the software services section, so you’ll find it in software services which is quite far down the page. Now, you can drag things around in your cpanel to rearrange it so you can get stuff easy but if you just scroll down initially, you’ll get the quick install. So, you’ll see in Quick Install that there’s quite a lot of different pieces of software that you can install from here. We’ve got WordPress obviously, which is the one we’ll want to look at but they’ve some other Content Management Systems too. You’ve got Drupal in here, you’ve got Joomla, you’ve got lots of other things, directory software down there, ecommerce softwares, you can install Magento automatically. Got lots of options in here for software but obviously we’re just looking at, in this stage, just installing WordPress to run our podcasting website.
So, all you do is get the blog software section, click on WordPress and then all you could do is click continue, and then that will ask you a few different details, it’ll ask you what URL you want to install under. Now, I would say you want to do it on the top level, so it’ll have something like http://yourdomain and then forward slash and it’ll ask if you want to put a sub-domain in there. Now, that is if you want to install your podcasting website on a sub-domain of a main website. So, that would be the case if you already run a website and you want to have the podcasting site as kind of sub-section of that website. So, you could create a folder called podcast for example, so you could do /podcast and then your podcasting website would be yourdomain.com/podcast/whatever, other parts you want to put to your URL there. So, you can choose to that if you want but I think on most cases, most people will run their podcasting website on a top level domain, so, that will be on yourdomain.com/nothing, actually just the domain by itself. So, it’ll ask you below that, in the installer press section, to put in an email, the blog title, and admin user and your first name and last name. And that’s all it really asks for, that’s all it needs in terms of detail to be able to install WordPress in the first place. Once you put on them, all you do is click install now and that’s essentially done. It will give you a few details here, so it’ll say “Your installation is ready, you can access them by going here”. So, note down your admin access address there, it will be yourdomain.com/wp-admin but you can note it down from here or if you do go on a sub-domains, if you had the main site and you went for a sub-section of that main site, it’ll be yourdomain.com/podcast/wp-admin. It’ll also give you your username and it’ll have an automatically generated password there. Now, you can obviously change that password whenever you like but first time you log in, just go to the link it gives you, type in the username and password it offers you and once you’re in to WordPress you can get, sorry, you can change your password, you can change your own details once you’re in there. And don’t worry, later on in this series I’ll be giving you a link to some instructional videos on how to use basic functions of WordPress. So, don’t worry I’m not going to leave you in the dark there, there’s going to be plenty of instruction on how to use WordPress itself. And that’s it, easy as that. That’s how you install WordPress in cpanel. That’s how easy Quick Install makes it. So, no software knowledge required, no technical knowledge, you just have to go in there, use the automatic tools and that’s your WordPress installed.
So, I realised that in the audio medium, it’s not probably the best way to show you how to do this so I do have some tutorial videos on how to do this. I actually teach a course on learnden.com called Creating a Great Business Website and as a full tutorial on how to do this, it goes through the domains and hosting stuff we looked at on the first episode and it also goes through today how to install WordPress and there’s full videos on that too. Plus, it will show you how to setup your emails, things like that as well on cpanel, if you’re interested. And you can get to that by going to podcraft.net/websitecourse, so no spaces in there at all just podcraft.net/websitecourse and you can go there. And that’s actually a free trial, that course is available as a free trial on learnden.com. So, it doesn’t cost you anything, you can just pop in there, sign up and have a look through that course. That will give you all of the video tutorials on how to setup WordPress. They’ll also be a few other things in that course that we’ll look at in later episodes. So, it’s worth signing up if you want to get the videos anyway.
Now, obviously, that’s how to do it with HostGator which is my main hosting platform. But if you want to go with the alternative Bluehost which is the other one I mentioned in the first episode then that’s absolutely fine. You’ll find a video for that, I’m not going through that in detail because it’s very similar, but you’ll find a video for it at podcraft.net/blueinstall, podcraft.net/blueinstall and you’ll find a video to teach you how to do it on Bluehost if you want to go with that instead.
Okay, great stuff. So, we’ve now got our website installed, that’s the first step. Now, we’ve got something to work on. You’ll start to see how it works, you’ll be able to look at your domain and you’ll see that there’s a website now present there even though it’s totally basic, nothing much there. Now, we just have to start to build it out. That’s what we get on to next.
Now, in the next episode of this Series 3 on building a peerless podcasting website, we’re going to look at actually installing the basics of podcasting softwares. So, the bits of software, the plugins we need to actually run a podcasting website. That’s what makes your iTunes compatible RSS feeds essentially. So, we’re going to look at that next. So, thanks again for joining me on this episode. I hope you find that useful. Pop on over to podcraft.net/website course for the videos again. And I’ll see you on the next episode.
