I guess many of us have definitely tried to build a website of our own and have failed. I know this because even I was in the same category until one of colleague as well as friend taught me to build a website step by step. So I would like to share the same here.

The first thing you have to decide before building your website is the theme or the subject of the website, it does not matter if there are thousand other websites with the same subject because later you can improvise on that by putting better contents than those sites. It is better if you choose a subject that is of your interest and something that you know a little more than others so that you can write more.

There are many ways of creating a website, by using HTML templates, by using website builder software, by using bloggers, wordpress etc. I prefer wordpress for a beginner as it is very easy to maintain.

First step in creating a website is domain registration, there are hundreds of sites available on the internet which will do the domain registration, but as a beginner start with a free domain registration site like www.co.cc, here you will have to sign up for a account and check for the domain name you want, because most of the times the domain names will be already registered by someone else. While choosing your domain name do not go for a very long name instead use very short and unique names which the users can remember easily. No problem if you use numbers in between the domain names like www.its4you.co.cc, etc.

Once you are done with this you need to sign up with a hosting site, which will host your website, again there are thousands of websites that will provide free web hosting, so go for a free hosting plan. I prefer the site www.x10hosting.com or www.awardspace.com. Once you register you will be directed to control panel of the site, where you will find many options like FTP manager, Domain manager, MySQL manager etc. Here you need to set up a FTP (File transfer protocol) account in the file manager using a user name and password and also create a database in MySQL manager using a user name and password. (Note that the FTP and Database user name and password need not be same).

Once you have done this go back to your domain registration site, where you need to fill out some details about your host. (Note that the procedure I am explaining here is for co.cc and x10hosting ) Click on manage domains, click on your domain name and select the set up option, where there are options like name servers, zone record and URL forwarding. First select the name server and put the name server value in the given two boxes (usually name sever values will be like ns1.x10hosting.com and ns2.x10hosting.com). Then click on set up again and edit the zone record with the following values, host – www.xxxx.co.cc (your site name) type – 1D option – A value – xx.xx.xx.xx

For the value option you will need to put the IP address of your host which you can find out by ping method. For example if your sitename is mysite.co.cc then go to command window in windows, type the following command ‘ping mysite.co.cc’. As you type it ,a IP address will be showed, which you need to enter in the value box. Save the settings and you are done with half of the procedure.

Now you will need to link your site with wordpress, so go to wordpress site and download the zipped wordpress 2.8.6, its around 2.2MB. And you will also need a FTP client to upload wordpress to your host, so download Filezilla. Now you need to configure the wordpress, so to do that open the downloaded wordpress folder and open a file with name wp-sample-config.php, in that you will have to give the name of the database name, user name, password and database server name. For example in the wp-sample-config.php file you will find a sentence like, xxxx(‘DB_NAME’, ‘yourdatabasename’); so here replace yourdatabasename with your database name that you created in your hosting site., similarly do for username, password, and server name (DBHost). All this values will be present in MySQLDatabases in your hosting site in case you forget. After changing the following things, rename the file to wp-config.php and save it.

Once you have done this much you will have to upload these wordpress files to your site so open filezilla and in top you will have options like host, username, password, port , so there fill out your FTP account credentials of your hosting site. host will be your website name itself, port can be left empty or put 21. Click on Quickconnect and you should be able to see your directories on your site. Now copy all the files inside wordpress (note that you have to copy all files inside the wordress and not the folder itself) and upload it to your home directory ‘public_html’ on your site. There are around 750 files inside wordpress.

Once done with this you need to install wordpress on your site, its done by typing the following in browser http://www.yoursite.co.cc/wp-admin/install.php. If all the above done successfully then you should be able to see wordpress registration page where you need to enter all details asked and you are now ready to publish your site. You can also upload different themes and plugins into the wp-content/Themes or wp-content/Plugins folder using filezilla also if you want.

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