Setting up your website - Working with CMS - Part 2

Hello Readers,

Welcome to the second part of Setting up your website - Working with CMS. In my previous post i wrote about how to work with Fully managed Wordpress hosting. If you have missed it, you can check it out here. This post will talk about how you can get a CMS working for you if you do not have a managed wordpress hosting plan. This post will also be relevant to you if you are planning to manage the CMS all by yourself without any external help. So, lets get started.

To get started with installing your CMS, you will need 3 things.

1. Wordpress installation file
2. Zipping software
3. FTP client (File Transfer Protocol)

Step 1 - Go to www.wordpress.org and click on the Download button to download the wordpress setup file.

The download should start immediately. It will be downloaded in a .zip format. Hence you need a zipping software like a Winrar which can help you extract these files. 

Step 2 - Get a zipping software on your system

If you do not have a zipping software, simply download Winzip or Winrar from the internet. My recommendation is, visit www.rarlab.com and click on downloads from the menu on the left hand side. A list of available zipping software should load. If you are using a 32 bit Operating system, pick the x86 version of the file, if you are using a 64 bit Operating system, pick the x64 version of the file. If you do not know the version of your OS, simply download the x86 version. Below is a screenshot for your reference.

Just click on the desired version of the Winrar file and let the download begin. Install the Winrar setup and run the setup. After this you should be able to open any zipped files on your system.

Step 3 - Setting up the FTP (File transfer Protocol) client

Next, you need an FTP which is used to transfer files from one host to another. Which means we will be transferring files from our computer to the web server. My recommendation for FTP software is filezilla. There are many out there, but Filezilla is free and is compatible with all OS. To download Filezilla, go to www.filezilla-project.org  and click on the download button. You will be redirected to sourceforge.com and the setup file will start downloading immediately.

Go ahead  and install Filezilla on your system.

Now that we have all that we need to install & run our CMS, we can get started with the installation. Its a good idea to check beforehand if the Hosting & the Domain are working in sync (propagated) To check that you can use online tools like whatsmydns.net Pick NS from the drop down and see if everything is green ticked on the right hand side result.

If you see a red cross, check with your domain service provider and resolve the issue.

Another way to check propagation is simply type your domain on the browser and if you see a page that looks like the below one, you are good to go.

Open up the Filezilla FTP client that you just downloaded. The interface will look something like this...

Filezilla essentially has 3 parts.

1. Part 1 - Credentials tool bar
2. Part 2 - Local file browser
3. Part 3 - Remote file browser

Now that you have all you need to get started with setting up your CMS, i will guide you through a step by step process to setup Wordpress for your site, setting up a database for your website, setting users for your website and finally Going live with your website. All this and more in part 3 of the this blog series.

Stay tuned and leave your comments, views and doubts on this blog in the comments section. 

Keep coming back for more.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia