For a Wordpress site, your Web host needs to provide the following:

• PHP 4.3 or greater
• MySQL 4.1.2 or greater
• The mod_rewrite Apache module

Most hosts provide these things. We recommend Hostgator and BlueHost. This tutorial will show you how to make your purchase using Hostgator.

If you go with Hostgator, we thank you, and we would love for you to use this link to purchase. We are a Hostgator affiliate, which means we earn a commission for each sale through the JiffyBat! site.

1. Go to the Hostgator Web site and click Web Hosting in the top navigation menu or click View Web Hosting Plans in the home page banner area.
2. Scroll down to the Web hosting plans and select your plan. If you only plan to have one Web site (one domain), then the Hatchling plan will be fine. If you have multiple Web sites or think you might want to have multiple Web sites someday, then the Baby plan is for you. (The Business plan includes a free toll-free number and dedicated SSL/IP, but for a basic site you probably don’t need these.) Select a plan using the drop down menu below each plan’s description. Notice that the monthly hosting price goes down when you purchase a longer subscription plan. You plan to be in business for the long haul—right?—so go ahead and take advantage of this deal!

   

3. Now you have a choice of buying a new domain along with your hosting or just buying a hosting plan. If you want to buy your domain now, select Register New Domain and type the domain you want (without the “http://www.”) in the field. (You may want to check to see that the domain is available first.)
   

   Registering a new domain while purchasing a hosting plan

   If you already have a domain, select I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only. and type your domain (without the “http://www.”) in the field.

   

   Use your existing domain

   Click Next and continue on to verify and complete your order for hosting only or for hosting and domain registration. You will be prompted to select a username and password during this process, which you will use later to access your hosting account. You’re done! You will receive a confirmation email with a welcome message and your login information.

The Widgets Panel

Log into your Wordpress dashboard and select Appearance»Widgets in your left-hand menu. You see the Widgets panel.

(Click the image to view it full size.)

The boxes in the center of the page are the widgets. The darker boxes on the right side of the screen represent the widgetized areas available in this theme.

Adding a Widget

You can easily add and remove widgets by dragging and dropping them with your mouse.

1. Expand the widgetized area by clicking the arrrow icon to the right of the area’s title.
2. Place your cursor on the widget you want to add, hold down the mouse button, and drag the widget into the expanded widgetized area box. When it “sticks,” you’ll see a dotted outline. Let go of the mouse button.

   

3. The widget may have additional options to fill in. In this example, you need to define a title.

   

4. Click Save. You’ve added a widget!

You can have multiple widgets in a widgetized area.

Removing a Widget

You can remove a widget in two ways. Either expand the widget and click the Delete link in the bottom left corner of it, or simply drag it out of the widgetized area.

Like all software, Wordpress is periodically upgraded to make improvements and fix security loopholes. It is very important to keep your Wordpress installation up-to-date so that malicious hackers won’t exploit those loopholes and wreak havoc on your site. Sometimes an upgrade may break plugins on your site due to incompatibility, but the small problems you might encounter are nothing compared to the headache of dealing with a hacked site.

upgrading wordpress = easy

repairing a hacked site = hard

To keep your site secure, you need to ensure that:

• Wordpress is up-to-date
• Plugins are up-to-date
• Your Web host is keeping its software up-to-date

Wordpress

When a new version of Wordpress becomes available, you’ll see a notice at the top of the screen in your Wordpress admin dashboard:

Figure 1. Reminder to Upgrade Wordpress

Plugins

When a plugin upgrade is available, you’ll see a reminder link on the Plugins main page, where all of your plugins are listed:

Figure 2. Reminder to Upgrade Wordpress Plugin

Step 1: Back Up Your Web Site Files and Wordpress Database

If you have read and followed our tutorial on backing up your Wordpress site, you are good to go. You want to have a copy of your Web site files (especially your plugins, in case the Wordpress upgrade breaks any of them), and a copy of your database.

Step 2: Upgrade Wordpress

You can upgrade Wordpress right from your dashboard. Click that reminder link (shown in Figure 1), and you will be given the option to download the latest Wordpress source or to upgrade automatically. You can do either, but it’s easier to click the Upgrade automatically button and be done with it.

You also can upgrade plugins with one click from the Plugins page, as shown in Figure 2.

Step 2.5: Update Your Theme to Replace Any Deprecated Code, If Necessary

You won’t have to deal with this often. Contact a professional for assistance if you feel like you’re in over your head.

Step 3: Check Your Site for Problems

Now visit your Web site and make sure everything is working. If it looks fine, you’re finished!

Uh Oh! Something’s Wrong!

The most common problem you’ll run into is that the Wordpress upgrade is incompatible with a plugin (or vice versa).

• You can visit the plugin home page (the link will be available on your Plugins page below the plugin’s name) and see if the plugin developer has made a compatibility fix.
• If the problem happened after upgrading the plugin, you can try reverting to your older plugin, which was backed up in your Web site files. Upload the old plugin source folder to this location with your FTP client to yourwebsiteroot/wp-content/plugins.
• Restore your old Web sites files and Wordpress database and start the upgrade process over.
• Consult a professional for assistance.

A blogroll is a list of links to Web sites external to your site. Examples are:

• Industry news
• Influential bloggers in your field
• Any information resources you think your visitors will find useful

You might notice that many sites include a Blogroll (or Related Links, Useful Resources, etc.).

This blog roll lists online marketing and Web design resources.

Adding a Blogroll

1. Log into Wordpress and select Links in the lefthand menu. On your blogroll page, you’ll see all of your existing blogroll links. (You may see a list of links to various Wordpress-related sites—those links are included by default when you install a new Wordpress site. Just delete them.)
2. To add a new link, select Links»Add New in the lefthand menu.
3. Type in a title for your link in the Name field. This title will show up in your blogroll as the link text.
4. Type in a Web address for your link in the Web Address field. (Not sure what to put here? Navigate to the site you are linking to and copy the Web address you see in your browser’s address bar. Paste that text into this field.)
5. Type in a description of the destination site in the Description field.
6. Select a category for your link in the Categories section. (Learn how to create blogroll categories in this tutorial.). Select Blogroll if you haven’t created any extra categories.
7. The Target section allows you to choose whether the link should open in a new browser window or the same browser window. You don’t have to fill in this section. Your link will open in the same window by default. If you want the link to open in a new window, select _blank.

Those are all the steps you need to take in order to get your blogroll started. To learn more about the additional options in the Add New page, check out the Links Manager article in the Wordpress Codex.

Displaying a Blogroll

Now that you’ve created a blogroll, you need to add it to your site.

1. Select Appearance»Widgets in the lefthand menu. Widgets are little modules you can drag and drop into your widgetized areas (typically sidebars). Available widgets are one the lefthand side of the screen. The various widgetized areas available on your site are on the righthand side of the screen.
   
2. Make sure the widgetized area where you want the blogroll is expanded. Click the little “down” arrow to the right of the title to expand it.
3. The widget that displays your blogroll is called Links. Hover your mouse over the Links widget and drag it into the widgetized area.

   

4. Select the category you want to display or, by default, All Links. (You can use the Links widget multiple times on your site, so you might display links related to a specific topic in their own sections—for example, Web Design Resources and Web Programming Resources.)
5. Check the Show Link Name checkbox. (You don’t need to worry about the other checkboxes right now.)
6. Click Save. You’re done!

1. Your Web site root directory files
2. Your Wordpress database

Backing Up Your Web Site Files

These instructions assume you are using a Cpanel hosting interface. We recommend HostGator for your Web hosting service, so if you are using HostGator, you have Cpanel. Your Cpanel access will be at http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel.

1. Log in using your hosting account user name and password (not your Wordpress username and password).
2. Click on the Backup Wizard in the Files section of your Cpanel dashboard.

   

3. Click Backup.

   

4. Now you will be given a choice of full or partial backup. We are going to back up the home directory only, so click Home Directory. (We will be backing up the MySQL database separately via Wordpress—you’ll se why in a bit, so keep reading!)

   

   You might also want to back up the email information associated with your site, which you can do through the Wizard, but that is outside the scope of this article.

5. Click Home Directory to begin the download. You’ll be prompted to save your backup as a tar.gz file. This is a compressed format. If you were to need to restore your files, you would use the Backup Wizard to do so, so you don’t need to worry about uncompressing the files.

   

6. In the download dialog box that appears, make sure the Save File option is selected and click OK.

   

Save that backup someplace safe on your hard drive or a flash drive. If you were to need to restore the home directory, you can go to the Backup Wizard to do so (only then you’d choose to restore, not back up, and you’d upload the folder you saved during back—so, again, keep that folder someplace safe!).

Backing Up Your Wordpress Database

Your JiffyBat site will come with a handy plugin called WP-DB-Backup already installed. (Download the WP-DB-Backup plugin for free if you don’t already have it.) Your friendly neighborhood Web developer (that’s me) will have already set it up to email you a database backup at least once a week. You can reschedule or disable this auto-send yourself. You can also back up your database on demand with a just a few clicks.

1. From your Wordpress admin dashboard, select Backup from the Tools menu. You will be taken to the Backup configuration page.

   

2. Scroll down to the middle of the page (Backup Options). This is your on-demand backup. You can download a copy of your database any time from here. Choose to save it to your Web server, save it to your local machine, or have it emailed to you.

   

   If you want to schedule a backup, scroll down to the bottom of the page (Scheduled Backup). Set the frequency of the backup and the email address where you want them to go.

   

You’ll see a lot of checkboxes on this page for tables to include or exclude. You can safely go with the default options, but if you have more specific questions and want more details about this plugin, head on over to the plugin developer’s FAQ or support forum.

Restoring Your Database

If the worst happens, and you lose your database, follow the instructions on the Wordpress.org site to restore it. Hint: You can access phpmyadmin from your CPanel account.

Note: You do NOT have to create link categories for your blogroll to function properly. Using the default “blogroll” category is just fine.

This tutorial shows you how to create a blogroll and add it to your site.

Creating Link Categories

You are able to make multiple categories for links in addition to the default blogroll. You can even change the name of blogroll to something else (Helpful Hints, My Industry Partners, etc.). Perhaps I want to list Web design resources and marketing resource separately. No problem! The process is very similar to creating post categories:

1. Log into Wordpress and go to Links»Link Categories in the lefthand menu.
2. Enter the name of your category in the Link Category Name field.
3. Enter the category slug in the Category Slug field. This allows you to control the Web address for this link category.

   Tip: Giving your slug a clear and descriptive name that incorporates relevant keywords makes your site much more search engine friendly!

4. You can enter a description of the link category if you like. Some Wordpress themes display this information (your JiffyBat! site probably will display this text as a tooltip when a user hovers over the link with his/her mouse). I add a description when I want a reminder to myself about what the category is to be used for.
5. Click Add Category.

Add a New Link Category

You’re finished! Now you will see the new link category on the right side of the Add Link Category screen in your list of saved categories. You can edit and delete categories in this section.

Example of Saved Link Categories
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