The following WordPress setup instructions and screenshots came from setting up my website which is hosted by Bluehost.  Bluehost is one of the thousands of inexpensive web hosting companies out there that will allow you to install WordPress.  You certainly don’t need to choose Bluehost but from personal experience I can tell you that I’ve used them for a number of years to do development, testing, and hosting of my WordPress sites with no issue at all and find that they provide a ton of website goodies for $6.95/month.  If you are interested in learning more about this host try the link below otherwise I will assume that you have an existing web hosting solution that uses CPanel for it’s admin interface and SimpleScripts to install/uninstall website features.

To install WordPress you will need to

• setup a database to store WordPress data, and
• copy a number of webpages to the web server.

Luckily this process has been greatly simplified by Simple Scripts which provides a wizard for installing WordPress.  Here are the steps:

1. Login to www.bluehost.com.  Once you’ve logged in you will be directed to the admin interface for your account which is called CPanel. 
2. Click on the link for Simple Scripts. This will redirect you to your secure Simple Scripts page.  From here you can install and uninstall a number of software packages.
3. Find the WordPress icon and click on it.
4. You will be prompted with information about WordPress.  Click the Install button. 
5. In the Step 1 section select the latest stable version of WordPress and the directory where you want WordPress installed.   In this case I’m creating the WordPress site right at the very root of www.corygill.com (no sub folder) and that means that this WordPress installation will be the first thing that visitors will see when they come to my site.  When working on a WordPress site for a client (you can have many WordPress installs on a server) I just create a subfolder for their site to go in while I’m working on it. 
6. In the Step 2 section click on the Click Here to Display link to show the advanced options.  Enter a name for the site and select the next two checkboxes.
7. In the Step 3 section click the checkbox stating that you have read the terms and conditions and then click the Complete button.
8. You will see a progress bar indicating how far the installation process has come along. 
9. When done you will see a completion screen that will have your website urls and your new admin id and password.  This information needs to be stored.  (p.s. I’m planning on doing a blog entry on a free program called PasswordSafe in the future.  This is a great little program for managing passwords)
10. Click on your site url and voila you’ve got WordPress up and running on your site!