I just ran into this problem today; thought I should post the solution in case anybody else finds themselves in the same boat.

I moved a WordPress blog from one server to another which was running lighttpd with a blanket 301 redirect to from www to non-www URLs. When I fired up a browser to test it, I got the dreaded “this website is responding in a way that will never resolve” message. A quick look at the lighttpd logs confirmed that I was bouncing from www.example.com to example.com then back to www.example.com.

I expected the first redirect but not the second, and checking in my lighttpd conf showed no rule that could possibly be triggering it. Thinking maybe I had left a redirection plugin running, I logged on the blog (by temporarily disabling the redirect rules) and checked, but couldn’t find anything.

Turns out that WordPress itself is capable of generating 301 redirects according to the “Blog URL” field in the General settings page. If the URL is set to http://www.example.com and a request comes in for http://example.com/some/page, then WordPress will automatically respond with a 301 redirect to http://www.example.com/some/page (which in my case, would get caught by my lighttpd rule and bounced back to the original request URL, and so on).

Moral of the story: make sure that your WordPress URL settings and any manual redirection you are carrying out are in agreement as to what the ‘correct’ URL should be!

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the most compelling reasons for owning your own website is being able to gather information about your visitors. If you’re selling products online, (using Etsy , for instance), then it’s even more important, since your visitors are your customers!

One of the best free analytics tool is Google Analytics – take a look at this recent post for more details.  Here are 5 questions that online sellers should be asking, and instructions on how to answer them using Google Analytics. I’ll illustrate each question with real data from this website – click each picture to see it bigger.

1. Where are my visitors from?

To see this, click “Visitors” then “Map overlay”.

Hopefully, the reason why this is important for online business is obvious – these are the people you’re trying to sell to, so make sure that they can buy from you! Do you offer shipping to the countries where most of your visitors come from? If not then you might be missing out on customers. Even if you’re not selling physical goods, but offering downloads or services, it’s still important to ensure that people can buy in their currency.  Looking at my data, I can see that my second-biggest set of visitors comes from Australia, so if I was running an online shop I would want to make sure that I offered shipping to Australia, and if possible listed my prices in Australian dollars as well as American dollars.

2. What are my visitors looking for?

To see this, click on “Traffic Sources”, then on “Keywords”.

Google Analytics divides your traffic up into “Direct”, “Referring Sites”, and “Search”. All traffic is important, but search traffic is by far the most important of the three. That’s because visitors are more likely to take action – which includes buying stuff! – when they are searching for something, rather than just browsing around. If you get search traffic for a particular keyword, then it tells you two things – firstly, that people are looking for it; secondly, that they have chosen to click on a search result for your website. In short it’s telling you, “write more articles about this keyword!” Also (and this is the only SEO tip I’m going to mention in this post), make sure your post titles include these keywords.

In my case, the top search keywords are for my Etsy seller tools (my treasury generator tool and my WordPress Etsy Feedback Plugin), so it’s telling me to keep building tools that the Etsy community finds useful.

3. Who is sending traffic my way?

To see this, click on “Traffic Sources”, then on “Referring sites”.

This page will let you know who is linking to you. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from a particular website, then it’s a good idea to go and check out what they are saying! If there’s a link from a page that’s relevant to your business, then leave a comment – this type of engagement with the community is important when blogging. Most of my referrals come from Etsy.com, unsurprisingly, and most of those are from the forums (you can click the name of a referring website to see a list of pages on that site that are linking to you).

4. Where do my visitors go?

To see this, click on “Content”, then “Event Tracking”, then “Categories”, then “Outbound traffic”.

You’ll see a list of web addresses like this.

It’s important to keep an eye on where your visitors go, especially if you’re selling your products on a different website. For example, if you have a blog, but sell your items on Etsy, then you want to make sure that as many of your visitors as possible go to your Etsy shop when they leave your blog. This page will let you check that. If you want to see which actual pages your visitors go to, then just click the name of  a website in this view. If your shop is not the top result, then you need to work on making sure that more of your hard-earned blog traffic ends up in your shop.

5. What’s the first thing that people see when they visit my website?

To see this, click on “Content”, then “Top landing pages”.

You might think that the “front page” of your website is the home page, but depending on how your visitors find you, they might never see the home page at all! This view shows you which pages your visitors see first, so make sure that these pages give a good first impression. If you have a particular blog post or article that is high up on this list, then you might consider adding a welcome message to new readers at the top of it. In my case, the first page that most people see is my Treasury HTML code generator tool, so I should probably tidy up the design a bit!

I hope you’ve found this article helpful – please let me know in a comment if something’s not clear. If you already have a WordPress website and you want to get started with Google Analytics, then take a look at this tutorial.  If you don’t have a website but you’d like to set one up and start taking advantage of visitor tracking, then check out this tutorial on setting up a WordPress website and blog from scratch.

This article will go through the steps needed to add Google Analytics to a WordPress website. Google Analytics gives you loads of statistics about the visitors to your website – where they’re from, how they get here, and what they read. Whatever your goals for your website – whether you want to promote a business, write tutorials, share your poetry, or whatever – you need a tool like GA to help you achieve them.

This article is written for someone with no previous experience, and I’ve included lots of screen shots to make it as clear as possible. The only assumption is that you have a working WordPress installation. If you haven’t done that yet, then follow this tutorial on setting up WordPress from scratch first. If you’re visiting from Etsy, you might prefer this version which is specifically written for Etsy sellers.

There are two steps to setting up GA for WordPress. First you have to set up a Google Analytics account. Then, you have to add the plugin to WordPress.

1. Sign up for a Google Analytics account

Browse to www.google.com/analytics and click “Sign up now”.

If you already have a Google account that you use for Gmail etc. then just log in here; otherwise click “Create an account now” and sign up for an account

Once you’ve logged in, click here to go back to the analytics front page and click the “Access Analytics” button.

Then, on the next page, click the “Sign up” button.

Fill in the URL of your website, and click “Continue”.

Fill in your name and pick a country, then click “Continue”.

On the next page, click the “Yes” checkbox and then click “Create new account”.

On the next page, leave all the settings as they are and click “Save and Finish”.

You’ll now see the overview page, with a row in a table for the site that you added.

2. Install and configure the Google Analyticator plugin in WordPress

Now we have our Google Analytics account set up, we need to add the tracking code to our WordPress website. Luckily, there’s a plugin that makes this easy. Log in to your dashboard and click “Add new” under the “Plugins” tab.

Now type “google analyticator” into the search box and click the search button.

From the list of results, find the one called “Google Analyticator” and click “Install now” to install the plugin.

When the plugin has installed, click “Activate Plugin”.

From the plugins page, find the Google Analyticator section and click “Settings”.

You’ll be taken to the settings page, which will tell you that Google Analytics is currently disabled. Click on the “Authenticate with Google” link.

You may have to log in to Google again at this point. When you get to the account page, click “Grant access”.

You’ll be taken back to your settings page. The final thing to do is change the drop-down box at the top to “Enabled”, and change the “Select an Account” drop-down box to the name of your site. When you’re done, it should look like this:

Leave all the other settings as they are, scroll down to the bottom, and click the “Save Changes” button.

You’ll see the settings page telling you that the changes have been saved.

To test that you’ve done everything correctly, go to your dashboard and scroll down – you should see a new panel called “Google Analytics Summary”.

Now all you have to do is wait! It will take a few days for Google Analytics to start collecting data. You can keep an eye on the summary panel and soon it will start showing some data. You can get much more information, however, by logging on to the Google Analytics website and clicking “view report” next to the name of your site.

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, take a look at this post for five questions you should be asking using Google Analytics.

This is a companion article that goes along with my article on how to set up WordPress from scratch. It will tell you how to move your blog from blogspot.com to a wordpress blog at your new domain. There are a few different ways of doing this, ranging from simple to complicated. I will go through the simple way, then explain why you might want to use one of the more sophisticated ways, and provide links to further tutorials.

I’ll assume, for this tutorial, that you’ve completed steps 1 and 2 from this guide. This means that you’ve signed up for hosting with BlueHost, registered a domain, and installed WordPress. If you haven’t done these things yet, read the tutorial and do them, then come back to this post.

A quick note: this tutorial has lots of screenshots – to see a screenshot full size, just click on it. As with all my tutorials, I suggest that you read the whole thing through before you actually start doing the steps.

Step 1 – export your blog and convert it

Log in to blogspot, and from your blog dashboard go to the “Settings” tab. Click on “Export blog“.

On the next page, hit “Download” and save the file to a safe location on your hard drive.

Next, we’re going to convert the file to WordPress format. This step isn’t strictly necessary, since WordPress can import content from blogspot directly. However, by doing it this way, we make sure that any pictures in your blog posts are copied to the new server, so we don’t have to worry about where they might be hosted. We’re going to use the blogger2wordpress tool which you can find here. Click “Browse” and select the file that you just downloaded. Click “Convert” and wait a couple of seconds. You’ll be prompted to download a new file; save it to your hard drive.

Step 2 – import the file to your new blog

Now log in to your new WordPress website (see the last part of step 2 from the tutorial if you’ve forgotten how).From the dashboard, click on “Import” under the “Tools” heading.

In the “Import” window, click “WordPress“.

A window will pop up showing you the details of the WordPress importer plugin. Just click “Install now” and wait for the plugin to install.

Once it’s installed you’ll see the success page – click on “Activate Plugin & Run Inporter“.

It will ask you to choose a file from your computer. Click “Browse” to bring up the file selection window, then choose the file that you saved in step 1.

Then click “Upload file and import“.

It might take a while to process the file, so be patient. When it’s finished, you’ll see this window. In the “Create User” box, type your own name. Check the “Download and import file attachments” box, then click “Submit“.

Depending on how many pictures you have, this next step might take a long time to run. Just be patient! When it’s finished, you’ll see the final Import window, which will tell you what has been imported. If you had a lot of posts, this will probably be a long list! Clicking on the “Have fun!” link will take you to your new website.

Step 3 – redirect visitors from your blogspot blog

Now we have all our content safely in place on our new website. We can’t just stop here, however, since the content is also there at the old blog! If we leave two websites up with the same content, then our visitors will get confused, and (more importantly) Google will not be happy and your search engine rankings will suffer.  There are several ways to fix this.

The easy way: Just log in to your blogspot.com account and delete your old blog.

This is pretty straightforward to do, but there’s a significant problem – you’ll lose all existing links, traffic and subscribers to your old blog. If there are only a few other websites that link to your old blog, you can probably contact them individually and ask them to update their links. Similarly, if you only have a few subscribers then you can probably send them a message, telling them about the new blog location. I only recommend this method it if your current blog traffic is very low, and you are confident that you can get all existing links to your old blog updated.

A better way: redirect your old blog to point to the new domain. To do this, log in to your blogspot account and go to the “Site feed” section in the “Settings” tab. In the “Post Feed Redirect URL” box, enter the RSS feed address of your new website – this will be www.yournewdomain.com/feed.

This will make sure that people who are subscribed to your old blog RSS feed will be redirected to your new one. Next, click on “Publishing”, then click on “Custom domain”.

On the next screen, click “Switch to advanced settings”.

Now fill in your new domain name (including www.) in the box, fill in the Word Verification, and click the “Save Settings” button.

You should see a little message telling you that all is well.

This method is better than simply deleting the old blog, since it ensures that any links to the old blog will be redirected to www.yournewdomain.com.  However, they will all redirect to the homepage of the new website, rather than to the appropriate post. This is the method I recommend for most people.

The most complicated way: use individual page redirects on your old blog. This requires quite a few more steps, so I only recommend it if you’re moving an old blog that has a lot of existing links to individual pages. Rather than writing out the whole process here, I will link to the best solution I have found – click here. The solution involves modifying the template on your old blogspot.com blog, then installing a plugin on your new WordPress website.

All done!

This is a companion article that goes along with my article on how to set up WordPress from scratch. It will take you through the steps required to move all your existing posts, comments, pictures, pages etc from your wordpress.com blog to your new, self-hosted blog.  The process is not difficult, but there are a few important steps that are easy to miss out, so read the whole thing through from scratch. I’ll assume, for this tutorial, that you’ve completed steps 1 and 2 from this guide. This means that you’ve signed up for hosting with BlueHost, registered a domain, and installed WordPress. If you haven’t done these things yet, read the tutorial and do them, then come back to this post.

A quick note: this tutorial has lots of screenshots – to see a screenshot full size, just click on it. As with all my tutorials, I suggest that you read the whole thing through before you actually start doing the steps.

Step 1 – export your wordpress.com blog

Log in to wordpress.com and go to your blog dashboard. Click the “Export” button under the “Tools” heading.

You’ll see the “Export” page. Just leave all the settings as they are and click “Download Export file“.

Save this file to your computer.

Step 2 – import the file to your new blog

Now log in to your new WordPress website (see the last part of step 2 from the tutorial if you’ve forgotten how).From the dashboard, click on “Import” under the “Tools” heading.

In the “Import” window, click “WordPress“.

A window will pop up showing you the details of the WordPress importer plugin. Just click “Install now” and wait for the plugin to install.

Once it’s installed you’ll see the success page – click on “Activate Plugin & Run Inporter“.

It will ask you to choose a file from your computer. Click “Browse” to bring up the file selection window, then choose the file that you saved in step 1.

Then click “Upload file and import“.

It might take a while to process the file, so be patient. When it’s finished, you’ll see this window. In the “Create User” box, type your own name. Check the “Download and import file attachments” box, then click “Submit“.

Depending on how many pictures you have, this next step might take a long time to run. Just be patient! When it’s finished, you’ll see the final Import window, which will tell you what has been imported. If you had a lot of posts, this will probably be a long list! Clicking on the “Have fun!” link will take you to your new website.

Browse around and check that your old posts are all there. They will probably look a little different, as the theme you’re using might not be the one you were using on wordpress.com. If you want to recreate the look of your old blog, make a note of the the theme you were using, and install it in the new blog.

Step 3 – fix your link categories

One problem you might have noticed is that your link categories have disappeared. This is a known problem with the WordPress importer – all the links that you imported will appear under “Blogroll“. If you only have a few links then this might not be a problem (in which case you can skip this step), but if you have a large collection of links divided up into different categories then it could be very time-consuming to fix them!  Luckily, there is a plugin that can do the job for us.

First, let’s delete any existing links. From the dashboard, click on “Links“. Click the checkbox to select all links, then select “Delete” from the drop-down menu. Then click “Apply“.

Now, we’ll add our old links back. From the dashboard click “Add new” from the “Plugins” menu. Type “import blogroll” in the search box, and click “Search Plugins“.

On the results page, look for the plugin named “Import Blogroll with Categories” and click “Install Now“.Click “yes” in the pop-up window, then from the “Installing plugin” window, click “Activate Plugin”

You’ll see a message saying “Plugin Activated“.

Now click on “Import” under the “Tools” heading, then click on “Blogroll with Categories”.

On the Import page, the address you need to type in the  left-hand box is http://yoursite.wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php. So if your old blog was at banana.wordpress.com, you need to type http://banana.wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php. Once you’ve entered the address, click “Import OPML file”.

The importer will take a while to do its job. When it’s finished, you’ll see a list of imported links, and all your old links should be back in their proper categories.

Step 4 – update the URL  in your posts and pages.

There’s one more problem we have to fix. If you have a link from one of your posts to another one of your posts, the link will still point toward the old website – the one at yourdomain.wordpress.com. To fix this, we need to go through all your posts and pages, and every time we see a reference to yourdomain.wordpress.com, replace it with yournewdomain.com. Luckily, there is an excellent plugin to do that job for us.

From the dashboard click “Add new” from the “Plugins” menu. Type “search and replace” in the search box, and click “Search Plugins“.

On the results page, look for the plugin named “Search and Replace” and click “Install Now“.

Click “yes” in the pop-up window, then from the “Installing plugin” window, click “Activate Plugin”

Now click “Search & Replace” under the “Tools” heading. On the Search & Replace page, click the “Content” box. In the “Replace” box, enter your old address, without the http:// or the www e.g. banana.wordpress.com. In the “with” box, enter the new domain e.g. yournewdomain.com. Then click “Go“.

You’ll see an info message telling you how many replacements have been made.

Step 5- remove the content at your wordpress.com blog

To make sure that Google finds your new blog successfully, it’s important to remove all the content that’s still at your old blog at wordpress.com. Before you do this, however, it’s a good idea to add a post to your old blog saying that you are moving, and what the new address is.  This will allow your RSS feed subscribers to subscribe to the new address. Then wait a few days before removing your old blog.

There are a few different ways of removing your old blog.

The easy way: Just log in to wordpress.com and delete the blog.

This will remove all the content from your old blog and make sure that it cannot be accessed. The trouble with this is that if someone follows a link to the old blog, they will have no way of knowing where the new blog is. If there aren’t many existing links to your old blog, then this might not be a problem. You can find out which sites link to your old blog by doing a google search for “link:youroldblog.wordpress.com”.  If there are only a few links to your old site, you can contact the owners of the linking pages and ask them to update their links.

The slightly harder way: Delete all of the content at your old blog, and add a post telling people that you’ve moved.

This will remove all the content from your old blog, but it will still be accessible. Hopefully, when people follow a link to the old site, they’ll see the single blog post announcing the new address and follow it. It still might be a good idea to ask people to update their links to your old website though. One problem with this approach is that if someone follows a link to a post on your old blog (rather than just the front page) then they’ll see a “Not found” page, rather than your “we have moved” blog post. To get round this problem, either add a text widget to your sidebar announcing that you have moved (which will be displayed on every page, even the “not found” page), or change the tagline of your old blog to tell people about the new location.

The expensive way: Pay for domain mapping from wordpress.com

This is probably the best way to deal with your old blog, as it ensures that anyone who follows a link to the old blog will get automatically redirected to the new one (though not necessarily to the correct page). However, it costs money (currently $12 per year) and is a little bit technically tricky, so it’s probably only worth doing if you have a lot of traffic to your old blog. If you want to take this option, you’ll need to upgrade from within your old blog’s dashboard:

Then follow these instructions: redirecting your blog.

All done!

Congratulations, you’ve successfully transferred your old blog to your new domain. Don’t panic if your traffic is very low for a while at your new domain – it will take Google a few weeks to find and index your new content. And don’t forget to tell people about the new address. You want to make sure that any new links point to the new address. Now you can start enjoying all the features that you’re not allowed to use on wordpress.com – experiment with themes! Add some more plugins! Make some money by putting advertisements on your blog! Go nuts!

If any part of this tutorial isn’t clear, please leave a note in the comments and I’ll try to improve it.

For some reason, every time I see images of super-complicated control panels, like on this page, I imagine them working well as a WordPress header (click to see full size):

Please, someone go ahead and actually make this blog!

Note to Etsy visitors: there’s an Etsy-specific version of this article here.

Introduction

Welcome, WordPress fans! Hopefully you’ve found this article because you’re searching for information on how to set up a blog or website using WordPress. Good decision! I’m a fan of WordPress too and I think it’s great for building all sorts of websites. I’ve used WordPress to build:

• blogs
• personal websites
• websites for small businesses
• websites to promote organisations and events

but they all start the same way – by setting up WordPress. This article will go through all the steps needed to set up WordPress from scratch.  I will go over picking a domain name, buying web hosting, installing WordPress and putting in your pages and content. I’ll also include instructions on setting up an email account for you at your new domain.

If you already have a blog at wordpress.com which you want to move to your own domain, do steps 1 and 2 below, then follow the instructions in this tutorial.

If you already have a blog at blogspot.com which you want to move to your own domain, do steps 1 and 2 below, then follow the instructions in this tutorial.

If you follow along, by the end of the article you will have a simple website with four or five pages and a blog section.  Here’s an example of the kind of site I’m talking about. You’ll also have a professional-looking email address at your own domain that you can hand out. Before we get started, let’s get one thing out of the way – this is not difficult stuff. I have carefully picked the hosting to make things as straightforward as possible – we’re going to set up WordPress automatically, so you won’t have to move or edit any files.

The article is quite long, as I’ve tried to explain everything as fully as I can, so I suggest you bookmark it so you can read it at your leisure. I’ve included plenty of screenshots so that you can see exactly what you should be doing. For the larger screenshots which show a whole browser window, just click on them to see them full size. I suggest that you read the whole thing through before starting. If you don’t understand something, don’t worry – the steps will still work even if you don’t fully understand why you’re doing them, and you will pick it up quickly.  Once you actually start, it should only take a couple of hours to get your website up and running. It might take a bit longer, of course, to fill it with great content!

Some of the links in this tutorial are affiliated links; this means that this site makes money when you buy a product or service using these links. Such links are marked with an asterisk (*). This doesn’t affect what I write, cost you anything, or change the product or service.

Step 1 – Pick a domain name and buy hosting

OK,first a couple of explanations. Hosting is just a place for you to store your data where it will be accessible to other people. A domain name is an address that people can use to view your website (like whalesharkwebsites.com).

I’ve lumped these two steps together because we’re going to be using BlueHost* for web hosting. BlueHost‘s hosting packages have two feature that are very important for us, because they let us keep things simple:

1. They let you register a domain name when you sign up for hosting. This means that we can take care of our domain and our hosting all in one place, and they’ll be automatically linked. This means that we can avoid having to link our domain name to our hosting package manually, which is a step that can be quite complicated.
2. When you sign up for hosting, you get a free domain name for life. This is good; not because domain name registration is expensive (it’s less than $10 per year), but because we don’t have to worry about renewing the domain name every year – this gives us one less thing to worry about.

This is the only step that will cost you money.  We want to sign up for the cheapest hosting plan,which is $6.95 per month – that will be plenty,even if you get loads of traffic. But first, we have to pick a domain name that is available. The easiest way to tell if a domain name is already taken is to enter it on the Bluehost signup page*:

If the domain is already taken, then you’ll get an error message:

How to pick a domain name

Here’s what you need to know about picking a domain name:

• If you’re in the USA, get a .com
• If you’re in the UK, get a .co.uk or a .com
• If you’re in another country, get a .com unless there’s some local custom that I don’t know about
• Don’t worry too much about getting the perfect name – it’s not the most important thing in the world
• If your building a website for a business, try to get yourbusinessname.com – i.e. if your business is called Jim’s Garage then try for jimsgarage.com
• If you’re building a personal website or blog, be as creative as you like!
  
• Make sure the domain name is short enough to fit on one line on a business card without resorting to a very small font

If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, try a domain name tool. Just do a search for “domain naming tools” and you’ll get lots of suggestions – play around until you find something you like.

Once you’ve picked your domain name, go ahead and sign up for hosting*. Make a note of your BlueHost.com username and password, because you’ll need it during the next step.You’ll be able to access your new website with or without the www. In other words, if you registered yourdomain.com, you would also be able to use www.yourdomain.com. This is all taken care of automatically by BlueHost.

Step 2 – Install WordPress

So you have a domain name and hosting, but if you go to the address that you registered, there’s nothing there. (Actually, there might be a placeholder page saying “hosted by BlueHost” or something similar.) If we were building a website manually, we would now start writing HTML code and uploading files. But instead, we’re going to do things the easy way and do all our writing inside WordPress. But first we have to install it!

Go to the BlueHost login page here, then enter your BlueHost username and password from Step 1.

You’ll see the BlueHost control panel with a loads of icons. Scroll down to the box marked Software/Services, and click on WordPress.

Click the green Install button

then make sure that the Where would you like WordPress installed box shows the domain name that you just registered.

Check the box and click Complete.

When it’s finished, the page will tell you your WordPress admin password; write that down somewhere safe.

That’s it; WordPress is now installed! If you now point your browser to the domain that you registered, you should see a basic WordPress blog with a “Hello World” post.

To log in to your WordPress, either click on the “login” link in the sidebar, or go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You should see the WordPress login screen. Enter the username “admin” and enter the admin password to log in.

You should see the WordPress dashboard  -  a page with a whole load of info, and a menu on the left.

Step 3 – Add pages

Now we have WordPress up and running, we’re going to set up the structure of our website.  Our first job is to add some pages.

If you’ve not thought about it yet, now is the time to decide on a list of pages you want on your website. Obviously, the pages will depend on the purpose of your website. You probably want a “Home”, “About” and “Contact” page for any website. If you’re building a website for a business, you’ll want a “Prices” and  maybe a “Testimonials” page. If it’s for a restaurant, a “Menu” page. If it’s a personal website or blog, maybe you want a “Photos” page or a “My pets” page. Make a quick note of the pages you want to add (just the titles will do). For the rest of this tutorial, I’ll use the small business example and assume that we want “Home”, “About”, “Contact”, “News” and “Shop” pages.

Now we’ve decided on the pages, lets add them. Click on the “Pages” link on the left of the dashboard.

You’ll see a list of all the pages that currently exist on your website.

At the moment, there’s only one – “About“. Since that page already exists, we don’t have to add it. Add another page by clicking the “Add new” button.

You’ll be taken to a form where you can set the title of your new page. Enter “Shop” for the title, and click “Publish” (don’t worry about adding content yet, we’ll do that later).

Now click on the left hand “Pages” link again, and you’ll see that you now have two pages – “About” and “Shop“.

Repeat the process to add “Home“, “Contact” and “News” (or “Blog” if you like).

Once you’ve added all the pages, click on the “My Blog” link in the top left corner of the window to view your website (or go to yourdomain.com). You should see links to all the new pages that you’ve created. There will be two links labelled “Home“, but don’t worry about that just now.

The next job is to make sure that the “Home” page is the first thing that a visitor sees. If you look at your website right now, the front page displays the recent blog posts.  If this is what you want, then don’t bother with the next bit – skip ahead to Step 4.  For this example, though, I’ll assume that we want the front page to be our “Home” page, and the blog posts to be on a separate page. To fix this, go back to your WordPress dashboard, scroll down and click on the “Reading” link on the left under the “Settings” heading.

Where it says “Front page displays“, check the box that says “a static page” and then use the “Front Page” drop-down box to select “Home“. Finally, use the “Posts page” drop-down box to select “News“. When you’re all done, it should look like this:

Click “Save changes“. We have told WordPress that we want the front page to be the “Home” page, and we want blog posts to be displayed on the “News” page.  Now if you visit www.yourdomain.com again, you should see that it’s looking better.

The duplicate “Home” link has disappeared, and the first thing you see is the “Home” page that you created (don’t worry that there’s no content there yet; we will add it soon). If you click on the “News” link, you will see the default “Hello world” blog post (don’t worry, we’ll delete that soon). You might notice that there’s already some content on the “About” page – this is just the default text that WordPress creates for you. Let’s deal with that next.

Step 4 – Add some content

Now you’re going to fill in the blank pages you created. To edit a page, log in and click on the “Pages” link on the left hand side of the dashboard like you did when creating them. This time, when you see the list of pages, click on the title of the one you want to edit. We want to start with the “About” page, so click on the page title to edit it.

You’ll see the same screen that you saw when creating pages, with a space to edit the title and a space to edit the text of the page. Delete the existing text and write something about yourself. Just write a couple of sentences about yourself. It doesn’t have to be perfect – you can go back and edit the page at any time (that’s the beauty of WordPress). When you’ve added your text, scroll down and untick the boxes under discussion – we don’t want to allow people to comment on the pages, only on our blog posts.

Why not add a picture of yourself so that visitors can see you – follow these instructions to add an image to a page.  Once you’ve made the changes, click the blue “Update” button to save them. Open your blog again and click on the “About” link to see how your new page looks.

Use the same process to edit your “Home“, “Contact” and “Shop” pages, or whatever pages you have decided you want.

Finally, let’s get rid of that “Hello word” blog post and add something more personal. Log in, and click the “Posts” link on the left of the dashboard. Just like with the pages, you’ll see a list of blog posts.

There’s currently only one item in the list – the default “Hello World” blog post. To delete it, move the mouse cursor over the title (but don’t actually click on it). You should see a little row of links appear – click on the one that says “Trash“.

That will get rid of the “Hello World” post and leave you with a page saying “No posts found”.

Let’s add a new post; click “Add new” and the post editing screen will come up.

You’ll notice that it looks very similar to the page editing screen, and it works in the same way – give your post a title (perhaps,”New website launched!”) and write a couple of lines in the content box. You can add images or links just like you did for pages. If you scroll down you’ll see a box on the right headed “Post tags“. Click in the box, then type your tags, pressing Enter after each one. When you’re done, scroll back up to the top of the page and click the blue “Publish” button.

Add a second blog post to check you’ve got the hang of it. For this example, I’ll add a post with a couple of pictures.

Once you’ve added a couple of blog posts, browse to yourdomain.com again and click on the “News” link. You’ll see your posts in reverse order – most recent first.

Step 5 – customize your website

Ok, you now have a website with a useful pages and a blog section. You know how to add and edit pages, and how to keep your blog up to date. Visitors can learn a bit about your, contact you, and read your latest posts. The last thing we’re going to do to our new website is customize it.

Take a look at the front page of your website. You’ll notice that across the top it says “My Blog” and “Just another WordPress site“. Let’s replace those with something more personal. Log in to your site, and click the “General” link on the left under the “Settings” heading. We need to change the first two bits of this form – “Site title” and “Tagline“.

Change the site title to something short and appropriate (for my imaginary business example, I’ll change it to read “Yellow Butterfly“). The tagline should be a short description of what the site is about – for example, “Handmade butterfly-inspired jewellery“. Scroll down and click the “Save changes” button, then open your website front page again and see how it looks.

Finally, let’s replace the header image (the bit that currently shows a road and trees) with something more personal. From the dashboard, click the “Header” link on the left under the “Appearance” heading. Look for the bit of the page that says “Upload image” and click “Browse“.

This will open a file chooser that will let you pick an image from your computer to use as the header. Remember that whichever photo you choose will have to be cropped so that it’s wide and short. Once you’ve picked an image, click “Upload” and you’ll be taken to the next page where you can choose how you want the image to be cropped. Play around with the position of the crop box until it looks good, then click “Crop and publish“. Open your website in a browser again and see how it looks with the new header.

Step 6 – Add an email account

One of the great things about having your own domain is that you can have yourname@yourdomain.com as an email address. Let’s face it, martin@yellowbutterflydesigns.com looks a lot more professional on a business card than martin789@gmail.com! Thankfully, BlueHost has tools that makes it easy for us to add an email address, so this final step won’t take too long.

Go to the BlueHost login page here, then enter your BlueHost username and password from Step 1.

From the BlueHost Control Panel, click on the “Email accounts” icon under the “Email” heading.

You’ll see the form which allows you to add a new email account. Fill in your name, and pick a password. Then click on the”Create account” button.

Once this has been done, you’ll see that the new account has been created. BlueHost has built-in webmail, so if you want, you can access your email from this page. Click the little down arrow next to “More“, then click on “Access webmail“.

However, for most people it’s more convenient to get their email forwarded to an already existing address, so let’s set that up next. Go back to the BlueHost control panel, and this time click on “Forwarders”.

On the window that comes up, click the “Add Forwarder” button

You’ll be taken to a form where you can fill in the name for the account that you just created, and the address you want the email to be forwarded to.  Once you’ve filled them in, click the “Add forwarder” button.

You’ll see a confirmation message, telling you that email will be forwarded correctly.

That’s it! Try sending an email to your new address to make sure that it works properly.

Done!

Congratulations, you’ve reached the end of the tutorial. You now have a customized website that you can show off, and a professional-looking email address that you can give out. There’s loads more that you can do with WordPress – you can add new features with plugins, completely change the look with different themes, and even add a shopping cart to let visitors buy your products without every leaving your website! Browse the WordPress category of my blog for more ideas.

If you’ve found any part of this tutorial confusing or unclear, please let me know, either by contacting me or leaving a comment. I want to use this article to show people how easy it is to set up and maintain your own website, so if you have any suggestions on how to make it better, please tell me.

If you want a more sophisticated website, you might be interested in my custom WordPress installation service – take a look at my Services page for more details.