If your hosting company does not offer a WordPress automatic installation you will need to start by verifying you have FTP access. Personally I use a free piece of software called Filezilla to manage my FTP accounts, but feel free to use CuteFTP, SmartFTP, Fetch or any FTP software you are comfortable using. Now that you have FTP software installed and you have verified that you are able to connect to your web server using the login credentials given by your web host it is time to download WordPress here. The default download of WordPress will be a zip file that you will need to extract prior to transferring to your webspace via FTP. While connected using your FTP software you will need to decide where you want to install WordPress, but by default it should be within the httpdocs or public_html folder. If you plan on building a traditional website and simply want to incorporate your Tech Blog as one aspect of the site then you will need to create a new folder inside the httpdocs or public_html folder. It is now time to transfer the files you extracted from the WordPress.zip download.

At this point things might get a little tricky for the novice, but I have faith in you so pay close attention and we'll get you through the next step. Inside the control panel on your web host will be a link to MySQL Databases. WordPress is built on a SQL database - every post, title, comment, category and tag is stored into a record in this database and that text is dynamically called upon via php code to render the blog (don't worry if that didn't make much sense, sometimes I get carried away). So now you are within the MySQL section of your control panel on your web host - now it's time to create a database. You will need to remember the name of the database, the username and the password. This information will be necessary in the next step of the process.