A blog (short for web-log) is a generic term used for a variety of website styles but most commonly it’s a place for a person or company to post articles. The benefits of a quality blog over other web publishing software is that common packages such as WordPress automatically publish content and help optimize it for the web, making the job of creating content much easier for writers.

How Diverse are Blogs?

A traditional blog looks and feels like a running dialog with one post preceding the other and little formatting to break them up but there are also some wonderfully complex installations of blogs these days ranging from major newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor to CollegeCrunch using the popular package WordPress. The platform is also used to power sites such as Rosie O’Donnell’s blog and the popular technology site of TechCrunch. The potential for powering websites is still somewhat limited but almost all commonly used forms of websites can be powered with blogging software.

How to Install a Basic Blog

Although there are many blogging platforms, I have a personal preference and bias towards the WordPress platform. It’s a free, downloadable open source software package with an unbeatable plugin architecture and expandability. Most large web hosting companies already have WordPress installed and simply requires you to go through the installation process to place it on your website.

If you need to install WordPress without the help of your hosting company, you can download the package directly from http://wordpress.org for free as an archive file to your desktop.

After you have downloaded and uncompressed the file, you’ll need an FTP client to upload the content to your web hosting provider. CuteFTP is a small, simple FTP program for Windows which I often recommend for non-technical clients, it has a 30 day trial available as a free download.

Installing WordPress in the Main Directory

Many website owners accidently install their blog in a sub directory such as http://thisismyurl.com/wordpress/ instead of the root directory at http://thisismyurl.com/ this is a pretty easy mistake to make and can be avoided by first deleting the content from your main directory (often called public_html or www in an FTP client) before uploading the contents of the archive file directly into the root directory.

Setting WordPress Permissions

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of new web users become frustrated trying to setup web based software, luckily the nice people at WordPress made it very easy for normal people to setup the software through an easy to use interface however there are still times when users need to manually set the security settings before a web application can access the files. If you have problems on the next step, you may need to right click the wp-content folder of the WordPress directory (on your server) and set it’s permissions to 0677. There’s an easy to follow tutorial located on the Codex for those users.

Setting up the Database

WordPress needs access to a database in order to work. Most web host companies allow you to access a control panel and setup a database fairly easily, check the email sent by your hosting company when you setup your account and follow their directions to log into your control panel.

Once you’re in you’ll want to create a new database and assign a user with full access to the new file. Remember that you’ll need access to the information here later, so write it down!

There are a couple of tricks when setting up a database. The first is to find out where the database is hosted, often it’s at a special website address called localhost. This is literally the same place as your website and it’s the default location but if it’s somewhere else you’ll be told when looking at your database information screen. The second stumbling block for many new website owners is the database name. If you’re on a shared host, there is a very good chance that your database is named with a prefix. For example, if your username is thisismyusername, your database might be called thisismyusername_databasename so be careful and double check!

Installing WordPress

Once you’ve uploaded the WordPress files, open a new web browser and go to your website address (http://www.thisismyurl.com for example) and let WordPress begin the installation process.

It’ll ask you some pretty straight forward questions and when you’re done, it’ll send you an email with your username and password for the new website.

Accessing your new WordPress website is done through a normal web browser, you can surf the front of your website as a normal visitor by going to your domain name, or you can access the administration area through the /wp-admin/ directory. For example http://thisismyurl.com/wp-admin/ is where I store the admin panel for my site.

Adding a New Theme

The default theme that ships with WordPress is great but if you’d like something more unique, there is a whole directory of theme designs at http://wordpress.org/extend/ or you can search Google and find thousands of great templates for free or a small fee. When you find the template that you like, simply upload the whole folder to your /wp-content/themes/ and visit your Appearance tab in WordPress. You can test the theme or activate it from with your administation client.

Common WordPress Installation Problems

The most common problems installing WordPress appear to be related to setting permissions properly and errors connecting to the database, the Codex has a great collection of common errors and how to fix them.