First you need a domain name. Even though I’m not a big yahoo fan, yahoo does provide a pretty simply interface and you can avoid my biggest complaint with them by buying the maximum term for your domain name right off the bat. I believe it is five years. They rip you off with a $34.95 renewal fee but, if you get the five year term, you can avoid that problem for several years and simply transfer to another service when it ends.

Here’s the interface you will see. From here, start your search for a domain name. I outline some of my domain name considerations at this link. After you choose your domain name, register it and get ready to move on.

Now you need to sign up with a hosting provider. I prefer hostgator but there are plenty of others out there.

Sign up for a hosting plan. Btw, you can also register your domain through hostgator as well and keep the entire process with the same company.

After you sign up, hostgator will give you your own ip address. You need this to access your control panel. Your control panel is where you control your website. To get to your control panel, you go to http://your_ip_address/cpanel. You, of course, substitute the actual ip address number for “your_ip_address”. Hostgator has great support and posts its instructions on doing all of this here.

To sign into your control panel, you will need your username and password which you set up with your initial registration with hostgator.

Ok, we need to backtrack and do one more thing. Hostgator, in the control panel, will tell you what your nameserver addresses are. You need these to associate the domain name with the hosting provider. For example, your nameserver might look like – ns253.websitewelcome.com.

Go back to yahoo small business and sign into your account.

You will come to this interface. Click on “Domain Control Panel.”

You will then see this interface. First, you need to unlock your domain. Remember to lock it again when finished.

After unlocking your domain, you need to go to “Manage Advanced DNS Settings.”

Finally, we come to this screen. Scroll down until you see, “Change Nameservers”. You can’t change the nameservers unless you unlock your domain first. Put the nameserver values in from hostgator. After this sets up, usually within an hour or so, you can go back to the control panel in hostgator and proceed.

When the nameserver settings take, you can go to http://your_new_domain_name/cpanel provided that you have set up the new account corresponding with that domain name with hostgator. Type in the username and password that you provided when you set up the account for the domain name with hostgator. And you will proceed to this interface:

Scroll down until you see the Fantastico icon near the bottom.

Click on this and from here you can install wordpress software directly on your website.

There are many other ways to create a website but this is a nice quick and easy way of going about it.

New to WordPress, then check out my wordpress video tutorials for more information.