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Welcome to WordPress Hosting

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Last Updated: May 4, 2009 2:36 PM

We've combined Go Daddy's most advanced hosting architecture and a pre-installed version of WordPress® to power your site. This article takes you through a few WordPress steps to get you started more quickly.

Check Out Your Site

There are two parts of your site: what the public sees and what you see as an administrator.

Browse to the domain you set up to preview how the public sees your site. Go to the WordPress Dashboard by navigating to your domain name /wp-admin. For example, coolexample.com/wp-admin where coolexample.com is your domain name.

Through the Dashboard, you add new posts, new pages, and manage virtually any aspect of your WordPress site.

How Do I Log In?

Log in with the user name and password you created when you set up your WordPress Hosting account.

The WordPress Dashboard

The Dashboard is the control panel that helps you create your WordPress site. Follow the instructions below to customize the site and learn your way around.

To Create a New User Name

You can create different types of users in WordPress. Each type of user has a different set of permissions allowing them to perform different tasks on the blog. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Users_Add_New_SubPanel for more information.

The user name you selected for your hosting account may not be what you want displayed beneath your posts. You can change that.

  1. Log in to your WordPress site.
  2. Click Users and select Add New.
  3. Supply the required information.
  4. Select Administrator from the Role field. Selecting Administrator lets you to log in to the backend with that user name as well.
  5. Click Add User.

This new user can log in to the backend and modify all of the site's settings.

To Delete the Default Hello World Post

WordPress creates a default post when it is installed. Now is a good time to delete the Hello world post!

  1. Click Posts and select Edit.
  2. Place the mouse cursor over Hello world! and a link menu displays.
  3. Click Delete.

To Change the Blog Title and Tagline

When you first saw your site, its title was WordPress and its tagline was Just another WordPress weblog. You can personalize that to make it fit your blog's purpose.

  1. Click Settings.
  2. In the Blog Title field, enter your new blog title.
  3. In the Tagline field, enter your new tagline.
  4. Review the remaining fields and update as necessary. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_General_SubPanel for more information.
  5. Click Save Changes when finished.

To Create Your First Blog Post

By default, WordPress displays your new posts on the home page in reverse chronological order. You can blog about anything, but successful blogs focus on a few topics and cover them well.

  1. Click Post and select Add New.
  2. Enter a title and then click in the body field to type the blog post.
  3. Modify other settings as necessary, check out http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for more information.
  4. Click Publish to make your post live.

To Create a New Page

Pages are like posts, but they aren't included in the chronology of the rest of your blog posts. What that means, is that pages can be static (never change) and aren't dated or have time stamps like your blog posts. Pages are great for "About Me" pages or contact forms. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages for more information about pages.

  1. Click Pages and select Add New.
  2. Enter a title and then click in the body field to begin typing the content of the page.
  3. In the Attributes area, specify whether you want the page to display as main page or as a child of another page.
  4. Click Publish.

If you create a page you don't like, you can delete or modify it from the Pages menu.

Changing the Look and Feel of Your Site

When you choose WordPress, you enter an Open Source community. The community 'extends' the existing feature set with new themes and new plugins among other things.

Themes

Themes dramatically alter the look and feel of your site. You can view and download themes from WordPress's site at (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/).

Plugins

Plugins can help you track stats, improve the performance of your site, optimize your site for search engines, and much more. Check out the available plugins on WordPress's site http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

Uploading Themes and Plugins

You can use an FTP client to upload themes and plugins to the correct folder. We also provide a File Manager in our Hosting Control Center that allows you to upload .zip files and unarchive them on the server. This saves you the time of unarchiving them on your local computer and then having to create a folder on your hosting account.

To Upload Themes and Plugins Using File Manager

  1. Download the theme or plugin you want to use. Keep the file in the .zip format.
  2. Log in to your Account Manager.
  3. In the My Products section, select Hosting.
  4. Next to the hosting account you want to modify, click Manage Account.
  5. In the Content section, select File Manager.
  6. Browse to the wp-content folder and open either the themes or plugins folder.
  7. Click Upload and then click Browse to locate the theme or plugin you want to upload.
  8. Click Close after the file uploads.
  9. Select the file you uploaded and click Unarchive.
  10. Leave the Select Destination field unchanged and click OK.

After performing these steps, you can log into the backend of your WordPress site and click Appearance to modify your theme, or Plugins to activate your plugins.

This should give you a good start. Go to WordPress.org if you need additional assistance.

As a courtesy, we provide information about how to use certain third-party products, but we do not endorse or directly support third-party products and we are not responsible for the functions or reliability of such products. WordPress® is a registered trademark of Automattic, Inc. All rights reserved.