My apologies to all that were on the call, but hopefully you could still understand what we were doing. If you would like to recap, please download the videos below!

In the webinar we covered:

• Upgrading to WordPress 3.0
• Installing and modifying the Basic Simplicity theme
• Adding the review content
• Adding some articles from ArticlesBase.com
• Putting a Clickbank Hoplink in a page to make a link and an image click-able
• Adding an image to the Sidebar using a Widget

The webinar is available in two parts this week (due to the network problems).

Part 1Part 2

If you are having any problems viewing the webinar, please use VLC Media Player – available at:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Til’ next week,

Bryan

]]> http://bryan-wain.com/building-wordpress-websites-part-2/feed/ 0 http://bryan-wain.com/building-wordpress-websites-back-to-basics-part-1/ http://bryan-wain.com/building-wordpress-websites-back-to-basics-part-1/#comments Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:05:08 +0000 Bryan http://bryan-wain.com/?p=286 Are you new to internet marketing or need a refresher course on WordPress?

Over the next few webinars, we will build a WordPress site together! I’d like to invite you to follow along at home and complete the same steps I take in the webinar series. After a few weeks, we will review some of your sites and make sure you are doing it the right way

In this weeks webinar, we find a Clickbank product, find a profitable keyword, register a domain, install WordPress, install a Theme, setup the blog and get ready to start adding content!

It may sound like a lot, but it’s pretty quick and easy to do

Here are some guides that I have written that will walk you through each of the steps in the webinar:

• What is a Domain Name & How Does it Work
• Steps for Purchasing a Domain Name from GoDaddy
• What Is Web Hosting & Why Do I Need It
• Steps For Purchasing Web Hosting Through HostGator

Also, here are some links to the products I used:

• Clickbank.com – to find a product to promote
• Micro Niche Finder – to find a great keyword(s) to target
• BustAName.com – to find combinations of words that make great domains
• GoDaddy.com – to register the domain
• HostGator.com – to host the domain on a server

We will miss the webinar next week due to the State Of Origin NRL football match, but come back on the 23rd of June. Make sure you have your site registered and ready to add content by then!

If you are having any problems viewing the webinar, please use VLC Media Player – available at:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

After working hard on my WordPress Training DVD series, I have finally presented my first training day on WordPress!

We covered a lot of topics ranging from Installing WordPress using Fantasico, to creating Posts & Pages and installing Themes & Plugins.

Out of the 15 people attending, I’m sure they went home with a lot of content to fill their days for the next couple of weeks

Gail Bottomley and I will be holding more of these training events in the coming weeks in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and hopefully, the USA!

If you want to learn more about WordPress you can join Gail and I on our Tuesday night Webinars at http://www.fimwebinar.com

If you upgrade WordPress through the dashboard area you will replace all of your source code, which is everything in the WordPress directory. So that’s all of the standard source code and all of the default themes, which means if you’ve changed or customised any of the default code, then that will be erased when you run the upgrade. But all of your custom things should still be in place if you’ve downloaded a custom theme and it’s not one of the default themes. Still be cautious though even if you think that you haven’t changed any code or have anything customised because anything could still go wrong and leave your website out of order and if you have no back-up then you will have lost it all.

So before you do anything you need to back-up your database and any customisation you’ve made to your website. To do that go to the back end of you website, either via the control panel or FTP, whichever you prefer to use.

For the purpose of this article I will be telling you how to do this via CPanel.

1. Go to the “File Manager” where your wordpress website is installed
2. Click the file you want to backup so it’s highlighted
3. Click “compress” in the tool bar
4. A new file will be created which is the back-up
5. Next you want to download that file onto your local computer, so click on “download” in the tool bar and download it to a location on your computer
6. Then delete the backed-up copy of the file from this area so no-one else can get to it by selecting it and clicking “delete” in the tool bar

The next thing to do (also from the CPanel) is back-up the database.

1. Go to “Databases”
2. Click on “Php My Admin” and back-up a copy of your database
3. Select the database from the left-hand side
4. Click on “Export” and make sure all the tables are selected
5. Make sure it’s a SQL file
6. Click “save file as” the click “Go”
7. Click “Save” and download it to a location on your computer and when that’s finished you have a copy of you’re database on your local computer

Now you should have your entire site directory backed-up and downloaded to your local computer and your complete database also downloaded to your computer. So now we can go back to the website dashboard of your WordPress site and use the link to upgrade your WordPress version and know that if anything happen to go wrong when upgrading to the new version we have the backed-up copies to revert to.

There is still one other precaution to take to help with a smooth upgrade so we’re going to go to the “plugins” area from the dashboard and deactivate all of the plugins.

1. Click on “plugins”
2. Select “all” then click “deactivate” and “apply”

So now we have the site backed-up the database backed-up and the plugins deactivated which means we’re now ready to come back and click “please update now”.

It will show a warning to backup your database and files which we’ve already done. So it’s safe to click “Upgrade Automatically”. It will tell you when it’s finished and if it was successful.

Now go back to the plugins area and reactivate the plugins that you turned off earlier. Once that’s done go back to your site to check everything is working fine by clicking around and making sure you are lead to the right places.

Hopefully everything should work if you’ve taken all these precautions, but if for some reason something goes wrong you have got all of your files and database backed-up which you can revert to if needed.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section below.

Happy blogging!