WordPress By Will ~ WordPress and Website Services ~ Installation > Management > Support

FTP programs allow you to easily upload and download files to your website.  Although there are many different FTP programs available, the one I use is FileZilla.  I have also tried CoreFTP, but went back to FileZilla.  This article discusses using FileZilla for your FTP needs.

You will use FileZilla to upload files like plugins, theme files and any other edited files you may want to place on your website.  You will also use the FileZilla FTP program to download backups of changed files from your website to your local computer for safe-keeping.

Once you get familiar with FileZilla, you will find it easy to use and very similar to using Windows Explorer on your computer to move and copy files.  So, first download and install Filezilla.  Then setup your account using the following instructions and the information emailed to you when you set up your hosting account.  If I set up hosting for you, you will have a text file that includes your FTP information.

After opening FileZilla, click the “File” tab and then the “Site Manager” link, followed by the “New Site” button.  Give this site a name such as your blog name.  Then fill in the fields on the right side under “Site details”.  In the first field under “Host”, fill in your site’s ip address.  Under “Servertype” put FTP.  “Logintype” is “Normal”.  Enter your username in the “User” field and your password in the “Password” field.  Then click “save and exit”.

Now when you use FileZilla each time, click File>Site Manager and then highlight the site you just created.  Click the “Connect” button on the bottom left and you will be connected to your website and hosting account directory.  On the left side of the FileZilla screen you will see your local computer file directories.  On the right side you will see the directories for your remote or hosting website.  Now it is simply a matter of dragging and dropping files you wish to upload or download.  For example to upload a new plugin to your site, you would navigate in the right side of FileZilla to /public_html/wp-content/plugins/ and place the new plugin files in that directory.  To download a backup of your theme files if you have customized any of them, you would navigate on the right side to /public_html/wp-content/themes/ and then further down to the specific file you changed.  Then just drag and drop the changed theme file to the left side of FileZilla putting it into a backup directory you have created on your local computer.

Here is a link to the guide to using FileZilla where you can find detailed instructions and tips on setting up and using the program.  Like many computer related things, it can seem confusing at first, but Filezilla is a real helpful and easy program to use.  Just read and go step by step and you will be an FTP pro in no time at all.

This question is a good one, and one that I almost always answer “yes”. In fact in this article, “Why You Should Use WordPress“, which you should certainly read, I discuss many reasons why a WordPress site is the best way for most people to go. There is, however, a small percentage of people that might find it hard to use WordPress, either for a standard blog, or as a Content Management System, (CMS), for a website.

WordPress is generally thought of as being easy to learn and use, even for people who are not overly technically inclined. However, like with anything new, there is a learning curve that most people easily master. However, if the image you have of yourself is that you are unable to understand or learn how your computer, email, word-processing, or other technology works, then you might be frustrated trying to master WordPress. Most people will have no trouble using WordPress to manage, backup and post information to a website. Even if you need to hire someone to do upgrades to the WordPress software, set up email accounts on your hosting server, or to insert a custom logo into the header of your site, there are still use and cost benefits to using WordPress rather than having a hard-coded html website.

But if you want a web presence but have no time or interest in learning how to work with WordPress. What if have difficulty surfing the web or using Google to find answers to questions. In this case, your choices are more limited. You can pay a lot of money to have a custom built html website made for you. Then you will have to pay your designer or programmer on an ongoing basis to maintain and administer your site. You can also have a WordPress site that you post new material to, but pay someone like me on an ongoing basis to do the maintenance and administration of the site. This costs less that the html web site route, but does require a small monthly budget fir administration and support.

Your only other option is to use a service like Blogger. The one size fits all approach of Blogger is very limiting, but no technical interest or effort at all is needed. The other problem with a service like Blogger is that your site is on the Blogger domain. You do not have your own domain name and unique web address. For example this site is underthewordpresstree.com. On Blogger, the best I could get is underthewordpresstree@blogger.com, not good for SEO or having a professional web identity.

So, don’t be discouraged, just be realistic in evaluating the type of person your are and what your budget for your website is. Most of you will do just fine with a WordPress site. If you are unsure, contact me and I can call you to discuss the specifics of your situation, helping you decide which path you should follow.

HTTP error.

Versions 1.5 through 2.6.1 of WordPress have what some call a bug, others a “feature” in the flash image upload tool.  As far as I can tell this is caused by a conflict between WordPress and the latest software from the Flash people.  Sometimes the solution is so easy that the reason for the problem seems irrelevant.  This is one of those cases.

If you have tried to use the image upload tool when writing a post and recieived any version of the “HTTP Error”, then all you need to do is this.  When you click on the “Add Media”  button to add a photo to the post you are writing, look for the following line:  “You are using the Flash uploader. Problems? Try the Browser uploader instead.”  Click the “Browser uploader” link and upload using that tool.  It should work perfectly.

If any one continues to have an issue, please post a comment here and I will look into it.

Backing up the information in your WordPress installation is very important in maintaining a WordPress site.  There are 3 main components of your site you should be sure to backup.  The first is the content of your site, and would include things like your posts, pages, and comments.  The second is backing up any changed or customized theme files. The third is having a backup of your upload directory.  This directory includes files and images you may have uploaded for use on your site.  If your host provides cPanel to manage your hosting account, then the first backup component, your site’s content, can be done using cPanel.  The second two components, changed theme files and files and images in your upload directory are done using an FTP program like FileZilla.  This post will cover using cPanel to back up your database.  A follow-up post will cover using FTP to back up images and theme files.

This article only covers using the “Backups” button on the main page of your cPanel administration screen.  You can also backup WordPress by using phpMyAdmin.  You access that by clicking the “My SQL Databases” button on the cPanel main page, then scrolling to the bottom of that page and clicking the “phpMyAdmin” link.  You can find complete instructions in the first section of the following link from the WordPress Codex on using phpMyAdmin for WordPress backups.  Here is another good tutorial on backing WordPress using phpMyAdmin.  I will often do a backup using the cPanel instructions in this article and then do another backup using phpMyAdmin, but then I tend to be overly cautious about having backups.  The funny thing is that I have never had a need to restore from a backup.  But it is important to be prepared just in case something does happen to your WordPress files.

Regularly backing up your files, whether your WordPress blog, or just your music, photos, and word processing documents is a very important task. It is certainly best to get in the habit of doing it yourself, but if you prefer to hire someone to do these sorts of administrative tasks, contact me and I can do the backup for you and send you the files for storage on your computer.  If you will do it yourself, then read on for the detailed instructions.

The first step I suggest is to make a “WordPress Backups” directory on your local computer that will be sure to get backed up whenever you do your computer’s regular backups.  Then within that directory, make a folder named with the date you are doing this backup.  In the future, every time you back up WordPress, make a new folder with the date of the backup.

Now it is time to login to cPanel at your hosting account.  If you have purchased, or will purchase, hosting as a result of reading my recommendation, then the url you will go to for login in to cPanel is: http://yourdomain.com/cpanel.  Of course you will need to change the “yourdomain.com” in that url to your own domain name.  If you have a different host and they provide cpanel, the instructions should be the same.  If your host uses something other than cPnael, you will need to ask your host for instructions on backing up your databses.  cPanel is a very powerful tool with many features I never use. It is, however, a good way to set up and administer email accounts, and to backup your WordPress installation. So, once you are logged into your cPanel account, the way to begin a backup of your WordPress installation database is to find and click the cPanel icon labeled “Backups”.

On the next screen, ignore the “Full Backup” listing at the top for now and find the listings on the left side titled: “Home Directory”, “Download a MySQL Database Backup“, and “Download Email Domain Forwarder or Filter Backup”.  Under the “Home Directory” listing on the left, click the link titled “Download a home directory Backup“.  Save the file in the dated folder you just created on your local computer.  Next, click the link under “Download a MySQL Database Backup” and save that file to the same, dated directory.  Then, click the link with your site name beneath the “aliases” heading under “Download Email Domain Forwarder or Filter Backup” section, and save that file to the dated backup directory on your computer.  Finally click your site name under the “forwarders” heading and save that file to the same dated directory.

Now that you have done the manual backups, go back to the top of the cPanel Backups page and click the link titled, “Generate/Download a Full Backup” under the “Full Backup” heading.  On the page that comes up, leave everything as is, and click the “Generate Backup” button.  A separate “full” backup will be generated and saved to your home directory of your hosting account.  In my next post on FTP backup I will tell you how to download that file to the same dated backup folders you used above.

That’s it.  After the first time you do this it will go faster than it took you to read this post!  Of course, if you would rather have me handle this along with other administrative tasks, I am available to do that for a set monthly fee or on an hourly basis as you need help.

This tutorial is for WordPress 2.6.  I am using the Firefox browser, although it should be the same for IE also.  To inset an image such as the one above, here is all you need to do.

First, you will need to have an image or photo on your computer that you want to use.  I recommend using a photo editing program, (Irfanview is good and free), to re-size a copy of your photo before uploading it to your website.  All of the photos I upload are re-sized first to a width of 800 px unless they are already at or below that. This is not necessary, but because some of my photos are very large jpg files, resizing a copy, (not the original), makes uploading my files quicker.

Next, while writing or editing the post you want to insert the image into using the “Write Post” admin panel of WordPress, put your cursor where you want the image to appear.  Then on the “Add media” section of the toolbar, click on the first icon.  (Hover your cursor over that icon and you will see it is called “Add an image”.)  Once you click that icon, a window will pop up with the tools to upload and insert your image.  There are many options there, but the simplest and quickest way I use it is this:

In the top left of the pop up window, click on the button labeled, “Choose files to upload”.  Another pop-up will open showing files on you local computer.  Navigate to the copy of the photo you re-sized in the first step above.  Click to highlight the photo and then click the “open” button.  The photo will be uploaded to the server on your hosting account.  If you get the infamous “http error” message, then do this.  Instead of first clicking on the button in the pop up window labeled “Choose files to upload”, find the line that says this: “You are using the Flash uploader. Problems? Try the Browser uploader instead.”  If you click the link for the “Browser uploader” you will be able to upload without getting the http error message.  Hopefully WordPress and the Flash people will get that conflict worked out in the next release, but using the browser uploader works well for now.

Now, once the image uploads, staying in the same window, you can set a few options to make your photo appear how you want it to.  First you can enter a caption for the photo if yo want one to display underneath the photo on your post.  If you do not want a caption, leave that section blank.  You can enter a description if you like.  This will not show, it is only for your benefit.  Again leave blank if you like.  Leave the link url alone for now.  That is where WordPress uploaded your photo on your server.  Then for the “alignment” choose one of “left”, “center”, or “right”.  Finally choose the size you want the photo to display at on your page.  I would choose “medium” to start.  If that ends up being too large or too small, you can edit the photo later to choose “thumbnail” or “Full size”.

Now click the button labeled “Insert into post” and your photo will be placed into your post.  If you need to change anything about the layout of the image, click once on the photo and then click the left “edit” icon.  This will bring you back to the edit pop up window where you originally set the options.  There you can change things like the alignment or the size of the photo.  Click the “update” button when you are finished and the photo in your post will be adjusted to your specifications.

This should get you started.  I suggest playing around on a test post with all the different settings of the image insert tool.  Very quickly inserting images into your posts will be second nature!

Themes, also called templates are the coded software packages that give your website its look. Although there are more important steps to take first, choosing a theme is often the first thing someone does when they decide they want a website or blog. There are thousands of themes available, many for free, some for a price.

Making The Choice

Choosing the theme you want to use for your site can be a very difficult process. WordPress comes with two themes included, but most people decide to use something different. There are so many themes to choose from that the task can be very lengthy. In addition, I recommend you actually choose several that you like and not get set on only one or two possibilities. The main reason for this is that many times are published and then not updated or supported. If a theme was released 2 years ago and has had no updates, it may not work well with the most recent versions of WordPress.

Where To Find Themes

One place is the official WordPress Theme Viewer. This tool has been around for a few years and contains over a thousand themes. You can search the Theme Viewer by browsing through every page of theme thumbnails. Or you can narrow your search by entering search criteria like “two column themes”, or “gray themes”. The main limitations I see with this tool are that you can not search by the themes publication date and you can not easily tell if a theme will work well with the latest version of WordPress. Still, it is a good place to start your search.

There is also a new, official repository that is just available at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. This is very new and only has a few themes in it so far.

When you are looking for a theme, as you come across ones that you might like, I suggest the following approach. Because it can be difficult to find and go back to a theme you saw yesterday, make a Word document that you can save information on each theme that you like. At the very least make a list with each themes name and url.

Here are a couple more sites where you can browse themes.

http://www.wpthemesfree.com/index.php?order=added This link is to the list sorted by most recent themes first.

http://wprocks.com/demo/ On the sidebar look for the heading “Themes”. You can click to view each of the themes.

The WordPress world is full of resources for those who want to make the effort to learn how to install, configure, and manage a WordPress site. If you have the time and interest to learn all about WordPress, after you take a look around here, I suggest exploring and reading articles in the WordPress online manual, (Codex), or on the WordPress support forums. If you just want me to install WordPress correctly for you so you can get started learning on your own, please read about my basic installation service.

The Codex and Forums are maintained by volunteers, and both have great search features. Be sure to search both the Codex and Forums for answers before posting your own question. The good news is that there are many volunteers that donate a considerable amount of their time to helping out new WordPress users. You will find, however, that most of the questions you might have as you teach yourself how to use WordPress have probably already been asked and answered. The search feature on the WordPress Support Forums is a beginner’s best friend.

The first thing to realize is that everything on this site refers to having the WordPress software installed on your own hosting plan. The website wordpress.com is something else entirely and unrelated to everything here. The site that relates to using WordPress on your own hosting service is wordpress.org. (Note the .org extension.) You will have nothing to do with the wordpress.com site, (except to register and get an API key for the two plugins that need one).

I know, it is confusing and I have no idea why it is set up this way. It is just one of those things that must be committed to memory without trying to understand why. Now if you hire me to get your website set up and running, you won’t have to worry about these sorts of things!

Back to why you should use WordPress instead of something like WordPress.com or Blogger/BlogSpot. WordPress.com and Blogger are much more limited in what they offer and in what you can do with your site. Customizations are limited and the ability to augment your site with tools and plugins does not exist.

WordPress gives you unbeatable power to do what you want to make your site your own. WordPress is also much more search engine friendly. If you want to have your own brand and web identity, then WordPress is your best choice. You also can not have your own domain on WordPress.com or Blogger. This website at either of those services would be underthewordpresstree.wordpresss.com, (or blogspot.com). That is very important for brand identity and SEO.

Every WordPress installation is unique because it can be drastically changed in pretty much any way you want. Additionally, self-hosted WordPress so flexible and powerful that it can be used as a replacement for the traditional hand coded html website. Using WordPress as a content management system, (CMS), even for sites more complicated than this one, or my Healthy Living blog, is where WordPress really shines.

Many of you do not need a complicated html site, and can get what is needed with less work and less expense by taking advantage of the flexibility and customizations available in a WordPress CMS installation. Some of you may even have an existing traditional html website that you just want a WordPress blog added to. I have done both and can help you with either need.

With a little help at the outset, WordPress can be mastered and understood. Even if you have no interest in learning the more technical aspects of installing and running a WordPress site, it is well worth it to hire someone to set it up, get it running, and do any future involved customizations or changes you might want. Someone like myself who has set up hosting service and WordPress sites numerous times, can make it quick and easy for you to get going. With a little training and some ongoing email communication, you will be comfortable in no time!

For those that have no technical interest at all and may not have even the minimal time needed to maintain a WordPress installation, I offer monthly maintenance services to keep you going full speed ahead.

I have written in detail about the many advantages of using WordPress for your website. One of the important reasons for using WordPress on your own hosting service is the ability to have a unique domain name. This is very important for brand or name development and recognition. This is also critical for search engine optimization. If you are a children’ book author named Ruth Maguire, it would be very beneficial to have a domain name like ruthmaguire.com.

Of course with all the websites in the world today, it is getting more and more difficult to get the name you might want. If you want richardmontana.com, it is available. I just checked! But if you want sarahjohnson.com, it is already taken. You get the idea, but the point is your domain name is limited only by availability, and your desire and creativity.

If you think that because you only want a simple, personal blog to start, you should get an account at Blogger or WordPress.com, I believe this is a mistake. You will limit your growth potential and not be able to have your own unique domain. Any future brand or name recognition and development will be severely limited. I believe those services are only appropriate for the simplest of the personal journal type blogs. If you are a professional of any sort, the Blogger and WordPress.com sites are not for you.

So be brave and spend some time thinking about what domain name will work for your website. Then have it hosted on your own account, using WordPress to manage the site. In the long run it will be a better and more professional choice.