Chapter 6 - The Easiest Way for Beginners to Start a Hosted Blog

Now that you have setup a new domain you probably want to get it up and running with WordPress so you can start making the most out of your new site.

If you have not signed up for hosting as outlined in my article covering “Installing and Configuring Your Blog for the First time”, you will need to do so before you can proceed.

If you have already installed WordPress and are interested in setting up a second domain to run another site you will want to checkout my guide on “Adding a New Domain to Your Hosting” to make sure that everything is in place to setup another blog.

If you have taken care of the prerequisites you are ready to move on to the actual installation of the new blog with WordPress publishing software.

Go to Dreamhost.com and log into your account. Once you are at the account control panel you will need to follow the steps listed below to setup your new blog installation.

The video above walks you through adding an additional domain to your hosting and then setting up your blog using the Dreamhost one click install process. If you have registered a second domain this video will walk you through everything you need to know.

• If you are setting up your domain and hosting for the first time you can watch from the 4:40 mark to get a good idea of what you need to do.

01. First, click on the “Goodies” link in the navigational menu to the left. It is located under the “Mail” link and above the “Status” link in the navigation menu.

02. This will open a drop down menu with several options. We want to select the option near the bottom of the list called “One-Click Installs”

03. Once you have selected this option you will be taken to a new page called One-Click Installs.

The page gives you three options for how you would like to manage the one click install process. The options are:

• Install new website software - Easy mode
• Install new website software - Advanced mode
• Upgrade or remove previously installed software - Advanced mode

You can choose the option that best suits your needs but I would recommend going with the “Install new website software - Advanced mode” option.

The reason being is that you want to have as much control over your site as possible. That’s why you went with web hosting in the first place, right? I will walk you through everything in the advanced menu, so you will know what options you need to choose.
If you are
04. Once you have clicked the “Install – Advanced” option a drop down will open and you will need to select the software you would like to use. In this case, since we are installing a new blog you would want to select the “WordPress” option.

There are several options available including:

• WordPress
• Gallery
• ZenCart
• PhpGed View
• OpenX
• Pligg
• dotProject
• Moodle
• Joomla
• Phpbb
• MediaWiki
• WebCalendar

For the sake of this article we are going to focus on the “WordPress” option.

05. Down below this make sure you select the proper option. You do not want to mess up a blog you have already created if you have more than one domain setup. (If this is your first blog installation then you don’t need to worry about this.)

It is going to ask you: “Install to?”

Make sure you select your new domain from the drop down list. (If you only have one domain it should default to the proper one.)

Once you have selected your new domain, if you leave the box blank after the domain name WordPress will be installed to the root directory of your domain. This is most likely what you want.

If you want to install WordPress into a directory other than root, most people enter “Blog” for this section. (This is mainly done when people are building a site and want to have a blog hosted on the website also. They may also do this if they are building a website around the blog.)

06. Once you have selected your new domain from the drop down menu you need to specify a name for the new blog’s database. You can go with anything here. If your site name is CoolBlogInfo, you might want to choose something like “cbiblog” for your database name.

• (If you get a message that the database name is already in use just try again until you find one that is available.)

07. For the section asking “Use Existing Hostname,” I recommend keeping this separate from your original blog. (This only applies if you have more than one blog setup on your domain. If not, disregard this.) It is probably set to your original information by default.

To change this, toggle the drop down menu and select “Create a new hostname now.”

Once you have done this, the Create a New Hostname box will become available and you can enter a new name. The default “mysql” label is fine but toggle the drop down after this to associate the mysql sub-domain with your new domain name. (By default this will be set to your original blog information.)

08. The next section asks you the “First User” for this database. I recommend creating something easy to remember here. You can go with the default, which should be setup from your original blog, but to keep things separate I created an easy to recall user name and wrote the info down so I wouldn’t forget it.

(If this is your first blog just choose a name that will be easy to remember and go with that. This will be your login and password for your database should you ever need it.)

09. Once you have entered all the information, double check this page to make sure everything is correct. Once you have determined all the information is how you want it and the WordPress installation is pointing to the correct domain, you can go ahead and press the “Install it for me now!” button.

Once you have done this you will be taken to the “Success” screen!

• Fantastico, shmantastico!

You will now see a message about your new blog being setup within the next 10 minutes.

After all the hard work you have done you deserve a coffee (or beer). Get up, fix yourself a drink, and once you come back to your computer your new blog should be setup and ready to go.

Congratulations, you have now mastered the Dreamhost One-Click Install program. You can see how useful this can be for quickly setting up multiple domains with their own blogs.

Now that you have setup your first (or second) blog, you will want to login and make sure everything is setup correctly. Check my guide entitled “Options and Menus Available in a WordPress Blog” to learn all the details of configuring your blog software.