Make your own band website part 1

  The regular readers of this blog know I have gone on about how you should not just rely on Social media as your web presence, but as a band or an artist you need to have a website! So I have been working and testing few ways of making a band website the way that any one with basic computer knowledge could make one. This is little bit larger task to take on, but once you do this yourself, you will be in control of your own band website. I will provide you here with all the basic info you will need to do this and some extra customizing ideas. We will separate this in to few blogs over the next few weeks. I am hoping you could build your bands website with me as we go through this and during the next few weeks I will do my best to help you in any problems you might have with the build. Also if we get some cool band sites done, I would like to feature them here on the blog as well. During the build you can Email me at jpkallio@hotmail.com and please write Web build in the subject line, so I will get back to you as fast as possible. There are loads of guides on the net on similar subject, but I'll try to keep mine simple. So let’s get straight to it:

   First of all, there are few things you will need for this: a computer and an internet connection, a credit card for registering domain name and server space, little bit of imagination (optional), coffee (not optional) and time. Making a website can make you loose the track of time completely, so don’t start this on a busy day.

   After lots of research and years of experience in running band websites, I decided to use the absolutely wonderful Wordpress platform. As you might know Wordpress is a blogging website, but also at www.wordpress.org you can download the Wordpress site and software to your computer and then install it to your websites server. The absolute beauty of this system is that once you have uploaded the system to your site, you can edit the site on line. You don't need any web design programs and once the site is up, you don't even need FTP programs (FTP is used to upload material to your website). As a musician on the move all the time, I find this system absolutely brilliant.

   So let’s head over to www.wordpress.org. The current version is WordPress 3.2.1, you can find a Blue download button on just right from the centre of the page - click on this. On the next page the WordPress has a link to their web hosting partners. These are really handy as they have automated Wordpress installation. If you decide to go this rout, just follow the provider’s instructions and once your site is installed just come back here and skip to the design part. But as not all provide this option, I will walk you through the manual installation. I've decided to change JPKALLIO.COM over to Wordpress site in the next few months, so you can follow this process with me and at the same time build your own website. So next we click the Blue “Download WordPress 3.2.1” button on right hand side of the screen. It will download the zip file in to your computers download folder (on PC, on Mac I would assume it would do something similar, but I haven't tested this on Mac). Now go to your download folder and locate the wordpress-3.2.1.zip folder - click on this. It will open in its own window, and on the top of the window there is a “Extract all files” button.

 Once you click on this button, new window will appear where you can choose a location in your computer to store your website. It looks like this:

 Click on the Browse button. Go to your documents and create a folder for your WordPress site. Once you have created new folder, click extract. Now the files are in your folder.

   The next step is to acquire a domain name and some web space. I know many of you might think at this stage, that spending money on this can be a big commitment, so did I while back, but you need to start from somewhere, so why not make it today? The domain name is the name of your website, for example ours is www.jpkallio.com. I would recommend you to go for .com as it is reasonably priced and recognised world wide. Good company I use and can recommend for registering a domain name is www.godaddy.com. Registering a name should cost you less than €10 a year. Their set up is well explained step by step, just search and choose your domain. They also offer specialised hosting package for WordPress websites between €50 and €60 a year. These tend to be the price you will be paying for web hosting anyway. You can make the payment once a year or separate it to several smaller payments. Also if you buy both services from Godaddy, they set the name and the server space for you, so just to make this as easy as possible, I will recommend you do this. They also have the free one click setup for word press.

   But once again, let's just assume you already have hosting provider that does not offer the one click setup. This is where it gets bit complicated (and that's why I recommend the above one click option for people who have not worked with websites before). You need to create a database in your web server and a MySQL that has all privileges accessing and modifying it. This is basically where you give the WordPress permission to edit the site. Log in to your web providers site and in your website management section, or control panel. Good web provider will have help page that will tell you how to create a Database and MySQL, but basically it goes along these lines: in your site tools and settings you should have a MySQL database button or icon, click this. This should give you an option to create a new database and name it. Once you have named it, you choose a username and password. Write the database name, username and password down on a piece of paper, as you will need these shortly. Click submit (or save) your MySQL username. I did check the above information in several hosting providers, but I'm sure there are some where the process is more complicated. In this case you need to contact your host provider on advice how this is done. Once the database is created click on it, or if there is edit database option click on it. This will give you further option to add a user. Username and password are required, then click add user or save. That should be it.

   Now open the folder in your computer where you unzipped the word press files. Here you have a file called wp-config-sample, or wp-config-sample.php. Right click on it and rename it to wp-config.php . Then open this file in basic text editor, like word pad. Find the following section in the code:

 // ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');

 /** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');

 /** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');

 /** MySQL hostname */ define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

  You need to edit the bold sections (they won’t be bold in word pad; I’ve just made them bold here to make things easier). Here is where you need the Database information I asked you to write down earlier. The name of your database you created, replace the putyourdbnamehere with the database name, replace the usernamehere with your username, and for the yourpasswordhere, yep you guessed, the password you gave for your database :-). As to the localhost, there is a big chance you don't need to change this, but this depends on your hosting provider. To save time, I would Email them and ask. I had a small trouble with this with Gate.com, and they actually had few variations, that I could not have figured out by myself. There is an article in the WordPress database on the subject for further help at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php Save the document and you are done with this step. If you are doing this web set up with me and you have trouble with it, contact me at jpkallio@hotmail.com during the week, and I can try to help you before we start the actual design in next weeks blog.

   Now for the upload of the WordPress to your server you need FTP software. There are loads of free ones on the net, I use WinFtp, and lots of people prefer File Zilla, but just Google FTP and see what you like. Your FTP program should come with instructions how to connect to your server, but as a rough guide, when you acquired your web hosting they would asked you to choose a user name and password. Also your FTP address is as your website address, except you replace the www with ftp, for example ours would be ftp.jpkallio.com. The FTP software will ask you for the FTP address, user name and password. Once you are connected, on most FTP programs you will have two folders open, one on your computer and one on your web server. Go to the main body folder in your server, usually this is called “web”. And on your computer locate the WordPress folder we downloaded earlier. Now you can usually just drag and drop, so drag the WordPress folder to your web server. It usually asks you if you want to copy the file to the location, just click YES. The actual upload can take some time depending on your internet connection, so here is a good opportunity to go make a sandwich and fresh pot of coffee when the computer do all the upload.

   So now, provided your MySQL database was set up correctly, your upload was successful (no interruptions in the connection) and the changes to wp-config.php are correct, you should be good to go. The next step is to log on to an address on your website, so replase “Yourwebsite” in the following address with whatever your domain name is, followed by the name of the folder where the WordPress files are in your server. For example if your folder in your computer was called WordPress and you transferred the folder to your server, the address would be: http://www.Yourwebsite.com/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php This will run the WordPress installation script. From here on, it is like installing any social media site, but with lot more flexibility and design options. If for some reason you get an error message of some sort, then there has been an error somewhere in the steps above. So carefully check your MySQL database details, and make sure they match your details in your wp-config.php. If you still have trouble, then contact your web host and ask them to check your database info and let them know you are trying to set up WordPress site. As I mentioned above I had problem with Gate.com with the set up, and the database info ended up being completely random address, so I could not have figure it out without their customer services help. But if you still have trouble, you can Email me and I can try to help you as well. However if all is going well, you should have the following screen on your site:

 So just fill in the site title, for example your bands name, your username, password twice and your email. Also do tick the box for your site to appear in search engines.

   So that's it, you have installed WordPress. Don't mind at this point that the address is at the moment is www.Yourwebsite.com/wordpress we will fix this later when your site is ready to go live.

   This is all we are going to do this week. Next week we'll get in to the fun stuff that is designing your site and adding content to it.

   This Friday the 23rd of September JPKALLIO.COM will be rocking the Purpleroom in Drogheda. It’s a late gig, doors at 11pm and the 24 Broken Amps will be with us as well! It sure will be a great night :-)”
   So that's all for now, next week we'll continue with the website project, so be sure to check back.
  J.P.