Mancky

This is work in progress:

In a nutshell:
I bought a domain name and web-hosting services; these are the name/address and the physical place for the website.

I downloaded free software to my computer (WinRar, FileZilla and WordPress); these are the tools for the job.

I uploaded WordPress to the web-hosting services provider, using FileZilla. In other words, I transferred the website-building tool to the physical place where the website will live; I did this using a file-transfer tool.

I used WordPress to create this site on the web-server.

My husband Michael helped me to get this site up and running. He’s a computer programmer so he understands the process well although he insists that you don’t have to be a programmer to host and build your own website; it’s just a case of following a series of steps.

Since WordPress was installed on the web-server I have managed the website myself without any problems, but getting to this stage without his help would have been very difficult.

1. Getting a Domain Name
www.xxx.com or www.xxx.co.uk or whatever.

I thought of a domain name. (Another name for the same thing is URL; Universal Resource Locator.)

I went to http://www.123-reg.co.uk/ to see if it was for sale.

I bought a domain name from them (my second choice) using Paypal. (Approx £6 for 2 years.)

2. Getting Web-hosting Services
Physical space for my site on a server somewhere in the world.

I looked around for a web-hosting service, which would support the use of WordPress. (I had noticed that a couple of nice sites were made with WordPress.)

In the end, I bought the web-hosting service from my domain name provider http://www.123-reg.co.uk/. The going rate in the UK is around £5 per month (in March 2011.) I had to pay for 3 months in one go, using Paypal.

I could have transferred to another company, if another company was cheaper. American companies offer a cheaper service but they tend not to support .co.uk sites (as I discovered, the hard way.)

3. Getting WordPress
This is the software I am using to create and manage the pages on this site.

WordPress is free; I downloaded my own copy from http://wordpress.org.

I then had my copy of WordPress in the form of a ‘zip’ file on the hard drive of my computer, which is a compressed file which needs to be uncompressed in order to be used.

I unzipped (uncompressed) this file using WinRar which I downloaded from here: http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm.

4. Setting up the WordPress Database.
WordPress uses a database in order to store all the details about the website.

I needed to set up a database in my Web-services Account, using their database configuration tool.

I went to my Web-services Account at http://www.123-reg.co.uk/. I went to my Control Panel; I clicked ‘Manage’, ‘Manage Database’ and ‘Add Database’.

The new database has an automatically generated name, a user name and a password.

I needed to copy this information into a WordPress file on my hard drive by editing the text by hand, so that my copy of WordPress matched up with the Database I had just created in my Web-services Account.

I located wp-config-sample.php. inside the WordPress folder sitting on my computer.

I opened it and edited the following sections:

I replaced the ‘database_name_here’, ‘user_name_here’, ‘password_here’ and ‘localhost’. The ‘localhost’ name was in an email I was sent by www.123-reg.co.uk, when I first signed up to their Web-hosting Service.

I then saved the file as ‘wp-config.php’.

5. Getting FileZilla
FileZilla is a tool (utility) for moving files across the internet; it does this using a system called ‘File Transfer Protocol’ or FTP. Any other FTP Client software would do instead of FileZilla.

The idea is that you don’t run WordPress on your own computer; you run it on the Web-hosting Services provider’s server.

So I needed to upload WordPress onto the Web-hosting Services provider’s server.

FileZilla is a tool I could use to achieve this.

I downloaded FileZilla here at http://filezilla-project.org.

6. Uploading WordPress to the Web-hosting Provider.

I was sent an email containing the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) details needed for uploading to the server, when I opened my Web-service Hosting account at http://www.123-reg.co.uk/. My Web-service Hosting Provider 123-Reg sent me an IP address of an FTP site, and another user name and password, for use with the FTP upload.

I opened FileZilla and typed in these details in order to connect to my website and upload my copy of WordPress.

There is good information about the whole process at http://codex.wordpress.org.

7. Creating the Website using WordPress.

I opened Internet Explorer, typed www.mancky.co.uk and the WordPress configuration page appeared. Any problems at this stage are likely to be due to the WordPress database having been set up incorrectly, i.e. Step 4.

WordPress wants a few details so I input the website name ‘mancky’, a user name ‘xxx’, a password and an email address attached to the website, i.e. [email protected].

WordPress accepted this information and the next stage was to press the ‘Install’ button.

My new WordPress website was now sitting on my server space ready to be managed and edited.

8. Back-ups

Regular back-ups are important because the website hosting service have technical problems from time to time, and they take no responsibility for loss of content as they say I should make regular back-ups myself.

On several occasions, I’ve logged on to find my site out-of-date, the most recent articles having disappeared. It is my responsibility to restore the material using my most recent back-up.

There are two parts to backing up a wordpress site… the database back-up, which is the text content… and the website back-up, which is the images and the wordpress template itself. The database back-up is the most crucial; the wordpress template won’t change from week to week apart from the additions of image files.

9. Database Back-up

Go to 123-reg website > Manage Database > Export > Go > Save to local drive.

10. WordPress Site Back-up

Open Filezilla

File > Site Manager > Select ‘site name’ > Connect

On the left is the local drive; on the right is the remote host.

In order to back up, create a new empty folder on the left.
Select all on right and drag to empty folder.