First let’s discuss WordPress.com and its advantages. The first advantage is the fact that WordPress.com is very easy to setup and maintain. In fact, you can be up and running with WordPress.com within just a few minutes. WordPress.com places your site on multiple servers. This helps protect your website in the event that anything bad happens to any one of the servers. Finally, and possibly most importantly, WordPress.com websites and blogs are entirely free as long as you are okay with a domain structure of domain.wordpress.com. For example, you might choose baking.wordpress.com or abcwidgets.wordpress.com. Now let’s discuss the disadvantages of using WordPress.com. First of all, if you wish to use your own domain instead of using the domain.wordpress.com structure, you will need to register that domain. WordPress.com does not allow you to install your own plugins. Plugins are like applications, or apps, for a smart phone. They allow you to add functionality to your website without the need to write any code. This might include adding a contact form, security programs, advertising programs, membership programs, social media connection buttons and more. While WordPress.com does have several popular plugins built in, you will still be severely limited. Another thing that you can not do with WordPress.com is add custom or third party themes. Themes are the framework that make up the look of your website. Every WordPress website, be it .com or .org, has a theme. With …

If you choose a hosting company that does not offer some kind of a one-click installation for WordPress, you will need in install in manually. This process is significantly more involved then the one-step installation, but it still only takes a few minutes. It does involve a certain amount of manipulating code, so if that’s not something you are comfortable with you may want to consider switching to a hosting company that offers the “one-click” installation, such as our preferred hosting company, WebHostingHub. Manually installing WordPress requires that you have access to your hosting accounts control panel, or cPanel, as well as an FTP client like Filezilla. To start, go to WordPress.org. Look for the “download WordPress” button and click it. Once the file has downloaded, “unzip” the folder. You can unzip the folder on a Mac by simply double-clicking on the zip folder. On a PC, right-click on the zip folder and choose “Extract all”. Now that WordPress is downloaded and extracted, login to your hosting account and then login in to your cPanel. Find the icon for MySQL, or my sequal, databases and click it. Enter a name for your new database. If you intend to have more than one WordPress website on your hosting account you should make this name something that will enable you to easily identify it later. Once entered, click on “Create Database”. Now click on “Go Back”. Your database has been created, but you need to associate a user with it. Scroll down until you see the …

Most hosting companies now offer some kind of a “one-click” installation which makes installing WordPress a snap. In this video we will be showing you this process in WebHostingHub, our preferred website hosting company. If you don’t use WebHostingHub…don’t worry…your hosting company’s process is probably identical to the one we will demonstrate. To begin, log in to your hosting account. Next, find the link to open your cPanel, or Control Panel, and click it. Now we will begin the installation process. In WebHostingHub we can do this by clicking one of two icons: Install WordPress or Fantastico Deluxe. Click one of those two and you will be taken to Fantastico. Choose the domain that you wish to install WordPresss on. You also have the option to install it in a sub-directory. If you plan to have multiple websites or blogs within your hosting account, it’s a good idea to install WordPress in a sub-directory. In a future video we will demonstrate how to hide the fact that you are using a sub-directory. If you only intend to have one website, just leave the sub-directory blank. If you’re unsure, just leave the sub-directory blank. Later, if you decide to add additional websites, you can watch our video on adding additional websites in the Going Deeper section of our video tutorials. Now enter the username and password that you would like to log in with once installation is complete. You technically can’t change this username, so make sure it’s something you are happy …

One of those most common questions we hear at Project WordPress is, What is WordPress? Let us take a moment to answer that for you. WordPress is free web software that allows you to build and maintain a beautiful website or blog. It is a CMS, or Content Management System. That means it has been designed to allow users to manage what appears on their website or blog without the need to be a web programmer. That’s right…with WordPress you can have an incredible site regardless of whether you know any web coding at all! There are other CMS systems in existence, but as you can see here, WordPress is #1 by a good margin and just getting stronger. In fact, as of the creation of this video, there are over 66 million WordPress sites in existence, split between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. And it’s growing in leaps and bounds with nearly 100000 new WordPress websites and blogs being created EVERY day. Why is that important? Simple. WordPress is built, enhanced and maintained by an ever-growing community of both paid and volunteer programmers. Because WordPress has so many sites and is growing so quickly, the community is just getting bigger and bigger, allowing for constant improvements and innovations. All of which you get to take advantage of for FREE. Another advantage of WordPress is it’s ever-growing library of templates, better known as themes. These themes allow you to almost instantly have a great looking website with very little work. Finally, in today’s word of …

View all of our videos at www.projectwp.com Here at Project WordPress we’ve had the opportunity to try a variety of different hosting companies. When all was said and done we made the determination that WebHostingHub was the best option for WordPress hosting, but we also ran across one company that is absolutely horrible for WordPress hosting. That company…..is GoDaddy. The reason that we recommend that people not use GoDaddy for their WordPress hosting is based on the way that they do their shared hosting. They actual put all shared websites on a GROUP of servers. In most cases, this is a good thing, and GoDaddy promotes this feature of their shared hosting. Unfortunately, based on information provided to Learn How To WordPress from GoDaddy employees, the database that lives at the heart of all WordPress sites is NOT kept on that group of servers. As people use your website, there is constant communication going on between the site and the database. Because these are located on different servers, it takes longer for the communication to take place…thus resulting in a much slower website. We spoke with GoDaddy at length about this problem and ran several tests of our own. The websites we tested weren’t slow all of the time, but often enough that it proved to be highly detrimental. And the only solution that GoDaddy was willing to offer? Moving us to virtual dedicated hosting which would have quadrupled our monthly cost with no gain except for achieving the speed that …