This tutorial references the self-hosted version of Wordpress found at wordpress.org — not the hosted version found at wordpress.com. If you’re still a bit confused about what the difference is after watching this video , read this.
Wordpress is a free software script and publishing platform and it’s the best way to build a website or blog.
It makes publishing to the web easy and it’s extremely SEO friendly. In other words, Google loves sites that run on Wordpress.
Moreover, it offers some other major benefits such as:
- quick installion and set up
- an easy to use “word processing like” publishing interface
- professional design powered by a multitude of free and premium themes
- powerful plugins that make it more flexible allowing you to do things like add videos, photo galleries and contact forms
- first class search engine optimization
- a large community of users creating tons of “how to” content and tutorials
Wordpress was orignally designed as a blogging tool but has evolved into a robust open source content management system. Many “static” websites all over the web run on Wordpress.
And when it comes to creating your own quick and professional looking single property websites, Wordpress shines.
Single Property Websites and Wordpress
The best part about using Wordpress to create your single property websites is that it’s super easy to use and the themes that are available give your sites a really professional look and feel.
Wordpress also performs great in all the major search engines. Anyone searching for street names, addresses and neighborhoods that you’ve created single property websites has a good chance of coming across your site once it’s been crawled and indexed.
This is great for getting on a potential clients radar as your single property websites exposes them to your marketing and personal brand.
In fact, every single property website you create with Wordpress is one more search engine optimized breadcrumb you get to leave for people to find.
Installing Wordpress with Bluehost
Installing wordpress with Bluehost is easy. All it takes is a couple clicks and you’ll have a brand new website up and running.
In your Bluehost control panel, click the Wordpress icon under “Software / Services”. This will take you to the Wordpress installation page. Under “Install Options”, click the green “Install” button.
This takes you to the Wordpress installion preferences page.
Wordpress installation preferences
Under “Which version of Wordpress would you like to install?”, leave the pre-selected version Bluehost has chosen for you.
The next option is “Where would you like Wordpress installed?”. Here’s where you get to choose which single property website domain you would like to install Wordpress on.
You have have two options here. You can install Wordpress on the “www” version of your domain or the version without the “www”. Whichever option you choose will be the default version of your domain that web browsers will take visitors to. Both versions will work but one will forward people automatically to the other.
It doesn’t make much of a difference which version you choose here but it’s become fashionable of late to leave the “www” out as short URL’s are now preferred on sites like Twitter.
Advanced options
Under advanced options, choose “click here to display”. This is the area where you can configure your website name and login and password details. The information you enter here will help your website show up in search engines for the keywords you want to rank for. You can always change this later so it’s not set in stone.
Under “Please give your website a name” I recommend entering the street address, neighborhood and city relevant to your listing.
For example, “456 Madison Avenue, The Annex, Toronto”.
Your next set of options is “Generate a random Administrator username and password for me”. I recommend you don’t choose this option and instead select a username and password you’ll remember easily.
Make sure you change the default username to something other than “admin”. There are malicious hacks and viruses that are believed to target Wordpress accounts using this default username. Choose a unique username and a strong password preferably with an uppercase character and a number or symbol.
Make sure you leave “Automatically create new database” checked.
Lastly, accept the legal requirements and click the green “complete” button.
New website details
Congratulations. You’ve just created a website with Wordpress.
When your installion completes, you’ll be provided with some important information that you should save (in addition to your username and password that you just created).
Bluehost will provide you with two URL’s. The first is your default public website domain name that visitors will go to. You can visit this now and see the bare bones Wordpress installion and the default theme that comes with it.
The second URL is your where you login to your website to access the administrator area or dashboard. This is where you’ll go to configure your single property website and add content and photos.
Your Wordpress admin URL will look like:
http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/
Open this link in a new browser and bookmark it so you can find it quickly later. As you create more single property websites over time, you can login to any of them simply by typing your domain plus “/wp-admin/” into your browser.
Your next step
You now have a working installion of Wordpress and a website ready for customization. You’re next step is to make it look good, get it talking to the search engines and add your listing information.
Single Property Websites 101
This is the second tutorial in a series called Single Property Websites 101 – a step-by-step blueprint for quickly creating your own single property websites on-demand.
In the next lesson, I’ll show you how to customize your Wordpress website and install the only theme I recommend for creating quick, gorgeous and SEO friendly single property websites. Make sure you don’t miss out by signing up to receive future lessons via email. Just enter your email address below now:
