How to easily setup a WordPress site

Wordpress started out as an easy to use Blogging software that allows pretty much anybody to manage and update a website. Through the years it has managed to transform more than just a blogging site, and now to a CMS or Content Management System. You can now create any type of site that looks really professional.

The best part about Wordpress is anyone can use it to update and add content to their website. All the user has to do is log in which brings you to the back end, and that allows you to add content to your website. It's kind of like Facebook, you log in, add content and people can see the content you added.

You can also change the look of Wordpress quite easily too, just by adding or changing theme. You can actually find many prebuilt themes if you search Google. Some of them are free, but the professional ones seem to go for about $20 to $40 on average. I like this because it saves web developers hours of time creating and coding my own theme. It just takes few minutes to find and install a prebuilt theme.

You can actually try Wordpress for yourself for free at Wordpress.com. This is a good way to get an idea what Wordpress is like before you jump in feet first.

The only problem though is the free version is pretty limited in what you can do. First of all you'll be suck with ".wordpress.com" at the end of your domain name. For example your site would look like this: mynewsite.wordpress.com. That kind of makes it a little hard for people to remember your site. The free version also put's ads on your site, which takes away from the professionalism too. Just these two things alone are enough to keep me away from using the free version if you're serious about your website.

There is a reason why they created a free version of Wordpress, in hopes that you'll upgrade to their 'value' bundle. But there are much cheaper places where you can host your Wordpress site. In fact, I know a place that's less than half that price called Hostgator.com. And the kicker is, you get even more features than Wordpress' 'value' bundle. You get unlimited storage, no file size limits, unlimited traffic and you can even add your own ads, and get paid for it.

Hostgator's normal deal is 20% off, but I did end up finding this coupon code that'll get you $25% off, '25OFFSQUIDOO' (without the quotes). And since the discount is temporary, the best deal is to do the 3 year plan, which ends up being $44.52 a year.

Even though Hostgator has a 45 day money back guarantee, three years is a lot to commit to if you're just beginning though. The very nice thing about Hostgator is they also have a monthly plan. Not very many hosting plans offer this. So if you'd rather do the month to month plan, 25% isn't that much, so I've found this other code that'll give $9.94 off any of their hosting plans here, "994OFFSQUIDOO" (without the quotes). With this code, it basically makes the first month for just a penny.

All you need to do is add this to the end of your sites domain name "/wp-login.php" without the quotation marks. For example like this http://www.yoursite.com/wp-login.php. The username should be "admin" without the quotation marks and the password should have been sent to the email you used when setting up your Wordpress site.

Thanks for looking at my tutorial. If you have any questions you can ask it in the comments below.