How to Install a WordPress Blog Using Fantastico

So you’ve heard all the buzz about WordPress, probably have some friends that use it and sing its praises and now you want to give it a spin for yourself. All you have to do is sign up and you’re ready to go with your WordPress blog, right?

Well, not exactly. Some blog platforms like Blogspot, are really easy to sign up and start blogging because they have taken out the work of having users host the blogs. This makes it easy for the user, and Wordpress.com offers this type of simple, sign-up-and-blog platform. However, this makes the blog less customizable and you don’t really “own” your blog because everything is stored on someone else’s server. 

A better blogging solution is to install Wordpress yourself using your own domain. With a self-hosted WordPress installation, you have to first find a domain and host before getting started. Below, I’m going to walk you through installing WordPress using Fantastico. In future posts, we’ll discus alternative solutions for installing Wordress such as using Simple Scripts or Wordpress’s own Famous Five-minute Install.

Although users still must have a domain and host to start a WordPress blog, WordPress has tried to make it as easy as possible to install. Many of the best hosts now have exclusive hosting packages, geared just for Wordpress. The hosts do some of the back and front-end work that you don’t have to. A couple examples are Blue Host and Dream Host.

Although you can buy your domain separately from buying a hosting account, it’s easiest to do this at one stop. First, you want to go to your host of choice, and sign up to for a domain and hosting. You’ll have to decide on a domain name that isn’t already in use. If you’re doing just a blog, you probably just want to call it yournameblog.com or something similar. Make it a name that will be easy for people to find you.

After being set up with a domain name, you’ll then go through the billing process and you’ll receive a confirmation email with details about your domain and account. Now your domain won’t immediately be ready yet. The domain name has to be propagated, which can take up to three days.

Once its been propagated, then you’re ready to install WordPress. You should have gotten an email from your hosting provider with information about where to login to your website’s cpanel. Once you login, you want to look for an icon or link called Fantastico. This allows one-click installation of Wordpress.

Once Fantastico opens up, you’ll look on the left and click on WordPress, which is under the heading “blogs”. This will take you to the auto installation.

On the installation page, you’ll choose to do a new installation.

You’ll now choose which domain you want to install WordPress on. If you just have one domain, then you’ll just install it on the one domain. This page will also ask you to choose a user name and password for logging into the administration section of WordPress.

After clicking to install it, you’ll go to the next page to finish installation.

After you click to finish installation, WordPress will finish installing and you’ll have the option of emailing the details of the installation to yourself. Now that it’s installed, you can use the username and password that you created to login and start writing posts. To login, you’ll go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/.