Think – Write – Connect

WordPress makes creating websites, blogs, and other types of Internet sites easy.  Installing WordPress, however, does take some “know how”.  Upgrading WordPress, backing up WordPress, and restoring WordPress takes even more “know how”.  For the person who wants to blog but isn’t very technical, this can scare them away from their own installation of WordPress and drive them toward WordPress.Com’s free online blog service.  There are many disadvantages to doing this.

For most, dealing with a hosting company is not fun.  GoDaddy, however, has made installing and bringing up a WordPress based website very easy.  I am the first to admit that GoDaddy’s marketing is a turnoff.  However, their functionality, commitment to excellence, and customer service has made them our primary choice for small business website hosting and blogging.  So much was the struggle between the brand and what they offered, my company did go ahead and “private label” GoDaddy hosting under our small business brand in order to provide our customers with their excellent service but get away from the branding.  This can be accessed at Efficient Business Hosting.

If you are interested in setting up a blog at GoDaddy, you’ll need to go to their site (or our private branding is always appreciated), buy a domain and an Economy Linux Hosting plan.  The one year cost for this is about $70.  Ignore all of their other up selling as there really is not a need for anything else.  Once this is done, you can login to your account and follow the instructions below.

1)  Under your hosting control center in GoDaddy, click on the “Content” menu and go to the “Value Applications” or “GoDaddy Hosting Connection” sub menu.  (I’m not sure why it appears as Value Applications on some and Hosting Connection on others but it appears to be a branding change or infrastructure migration process at GoDaddy which generally leads to plenty of good improvements from their side.)

2)  Once in the Value Applications portal, choose “Blogs” from the left hand menu and select WordPress once the menu unfolds.

3)  After choosing to install WordPress into a domain that you’ve selected, you’ll need to go through the installation wizard which asks some basic questions.  The first question will be the database description and password.  You really don’t need to worry about this as you’ll be able to get to the MySQL database from GoDaddy’s hosting control panel should you ever need to get into the database.  Thus, no real need to write down this password.

4)  The next decision is a big one.  You’ll need to choose a URL.  See our article on Top 5 Setup Considerations for WordPress to better understand this.

5)  After this, setup your administrator for your WordPress installation.  “admin” is a pretty standard name and you should chose a password with letters and numbers to make hacking your blog a little more difficult.

GoDaddy’s services will take anywhere from 10 minutes to one half hour to complete the installation and then you can access your WordPress installation from www.myblogdomain.com/wp-admin or www.mydomain.com/blog/wp-admin depending on how you setup your URL.  You can install plugins directly from within the WordPress administrative console.  You’ll actually have to login to the GoDaddy console to install new themes.

Once your blog is running, you can return to GoDaddy’s Value Application console to peform upgrades of your WordPress installation.  It is smart to keep up with WordPress progress and not get too out of date as compatibility with plugins and themes can vary over the years.  Once a year, upgrade your blog.  GoDaddy usually stays a rev back to insure stability and they will actually back up your entire blog and give you 14 days to revert to the old installation should your upgrade fail.  This is all “one click” style wizards and anyone can do this.