Building a GOOD website from scratch takes many years of design experience as well as dozens of hours of time on the website design itself. You could take this route, but if you have no prior experience this is going to seem like a daunting and impossible task. Rest easy because there is more than one way to start a website. In this article, I am going to cover what I think is the easiest and quickest method to getting your new website idea online. With this method, you should be able to get a good looking website online within 15 minutes.

There are many free web applications available that are basically a website in a box. All you do is install the script and find a good pre designed theme for your software. I will use the WordPress blog software in this example but there are plenty of other free web apps available for download.

What is WordPress anyway?

WordPress is a free blogging script written in PHP and programmed to run off a MySQL database. Even though WP is considered a blogging software, it can be converted to act as your standard idea of a website.

Part 1: Installation/Setup and Configuration

I am assuming that you already have two things:

• A Web hosting account that supports PHP and MySQL
• A domain name

To begin the installation, download the latest stable version of WordPress from www.wordpress.org. Unzip the file into a folder labeled blog.

Login to your FTP server or file manager and navigate to your web document root. If you are on a cpanel server it would be /public_html

By uploaded the folder blog to /public_html you can access your blog install at http://yourdomain.com/blog/

If you want to install the blog so that it is viewable by going to www.yourdomain.com than upload the contents under the directory ‘blog’ and not the directory ‘blog’ itself. Basically you are uploaded the contents in blog while leaving the main directory ‘blog’ on your computer.

After you have uploaded the files, it is now time to setup your database. You can do this within your web hosting control panel like cpanel, plesk, directadmin, etc.

Once you have created the database and added a user to it, you must setup the config file within wordpress. This is located at /public_html/blog/wp-config-sample.php

Edit the file in notepad and change the database information so that it reflects the database you just setup. Save the file as wp-config.php. Upload this file to /public_html/blog/. If you have done this right, it will NOT ask you to overwrite any files.

Your setup is now completed. All you have to do is go to your blog installation through www.yourdomain.com and it will quick WP Setup. All you have to do is fill in a few text boxes…it’s easy don’t worry.

So now you have a default website setup installed to be viewable at www.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/blog. If you want to, you could start your website right now…however it will be the default look/configuration.

Now it is time to change the look of your website:

Simply download the theme you want at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Unzip and upload the theme directory to your wordpress installations theme repository located at: /public_html/blog/wp-content/theme/. You will see 1 or 2 of the default themes already in there.

To enable the them, login to your wp admin panel located at http://youdomain.com/blog/wp-admin or http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ (depending on where you uplaoded it). Click the themes tab, click the thumbnail of the theme you just uploaded and click activate.

Thats it! Now you have a brand new website that will look really good which is also easy to use and update.

That is great, but its not exactly what I wanted!

I highly recommend you play with WordPress before you come to this conclusion. I guarantee that WP can do 99% of the things you want it to do. You just need to play around with it. If you really want your website to be 100% the way you want it, than forget about using pre installed software and go pick up a few web design books – html, css, and working with photoshop. Then spend the next year designing as many websites as you can. Your first web design is going to look like crap, your 2nd web design is going to be just as worse, and your third design might be slightly better than the 1st and 2nd. Web design is all a matter of experience and NOT knowledge.