Log in to Reclaim Hosting and click on the button marked cPanel.
In the Application section, click on the button marked All Applications.
This will bring you to the Installatron. Scroll down to the “Apps for Content Management” section. Click on the button marked “WordPress.”
This will bring you to the page for the WordPress application in the Installatron. You can read all of the details about the software and check out the demo and screenshots. Click on the button marked “Install this application” to the right of your screen.
This will bring you to the Install page for the software. You will be presented with several options for how you would like to install WordPress.
Location – The first option will have you select the “Domain” where you would like this website to be hosted. If you only have one domain with Reclaim, this will be the only option listed.
You may be presented with an option for “https://” or “http://”…if so, I would select https://. You may also be presented with your domain with or without the “www.” You can select either. Most browsers will automatically add or remove this as people search for and click on your webpages.
For the “Directory (Optional)” section, this may already have “blog” written in. You can leave this alone, change it to something like “HIST390,” or remove the extension.
Version – This is the version of WordPress and Language that you would like to use to install your software. By default our automated installer will add the latest copy of WordPress to your site and keep it up-to-date automatically. I would leave this section alone.
You will also have a section for the WordPress end-user license agreement (EULA). You can read and accept the license agreement here.
Finally, there are options for automatically updating the software. I typically change “Automatic Update” to “minor versions and security releases.” The second and third options indicate that you want the plugins and themes to automatically update. This is generally a good thing, but sometimes the themes updates are better to manually review -your call on what you want to do here.
The last option is to automatically create a backup and restore this backup if something goes wrong in the update.
Settings – In this section you’ll want to add an administrator username and password. Change this to something you will remember. Write it down and save it somewhere safe.
You will also enter the Administrator email if it hasn’t already been added. You can ignore the “Website Title” and “Website Tagline” for now. Finally, I leave the two settings for “Limit Login Attempts” and “Enable Multi-site” to the recommended settings.
Advanced – The last section includes additional settings for WordPress. I select “Automatically manage advanced settings for me” under the “Advanced Setting Management” heading.
Now click Install at the bottom to start the installation.
Understanding your new website
When the installs is complete you’ll be presented with links to access both the homepage as well as the Administration area for WordPress (the Dashboard). If this is your first website or application…you should only see the one you just installed.
If you scroll down to your website in “My Applications,”* you will see the listing for your new WordPress website. It will show you a screenshot of the homepage of your website. You can also see the link to the website, as well as a link to go edit your website. The middle address that ends in wp-admin is what you want to click on to access the admin section (the dashboard) of your WordPress website where you can go to edit. Make sure to bookmark/add to favorites this web address.
*The applications page is also where you to Download this installation of WordPress or Delete it. Finally, you can review the Version, date of install, date of last update, and the number of backups you have for this installation.
Next steps
At this point, you have a new domain, web hosting, and a shiny new WordPress website living at your domain. You can go ahead and look as this tutorial to help you set up your first blog post: Let’s Get Started With WordPress – The Dashboard and Making a Post
In next class, we’ll discuss how to select a theme and modify the look of your WordPress website.
