I first started by creating a WordPress site locally on my Windows 7 PC running Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server. WordPress install was straight forward as all I needed to do was get into Web Platform Installer within the IIS console and select WordPress from the list of new applications.

Once installed I could browse the localhost and login as Admin for the 1st time. After trying out the default themes and downloading a good few others I settled on using the Atahualpa theme for my site. I found it gave me plenty of customization and configuration options. Enough for my purpose anyway.

I used Contact Form 7 plugin to create a custom form for web site users to send me email's. It's simple but flexible. I also wanted to make sure wouldn't be sent using an automated script so I used Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin which goes along with Contact Form 7.

For adding my social links to the web site I used the Find Me On plugin which gave me exactly what I wanted which was a series of icons and configurable links for most of the social networks that I use. It is also available within the widgets section so I could place them anywhere I want them within the site.

Once I had the basic site setup as I wanted it I needed to move it to my ISP. I setup my ISP domain account for Linux hosting. Created a MySQL database. I copied my site contents to the web root directory and only then realised that the posts and pages were all stored in the database rather than as files within the content. I spent a little while getting to grips with how to dump the contents of my local SQL database. I tried a number of backup and restore plugins from within WordPress. None really did the job for me (at least they didn't seem to with my limited WP migration knowledge). I eventually found ana database administration application called Navicat. It has a free lite version which was all aI really needed. I was able to dump the local WordPress database to an SQL file which I could then upload to my newly created ISP database. That worked a treat.

I then had my first running WordPress site available to the world.

After a little testing I found that as I had initially create the WordPress site on my local PC under IIS that for some reason the permalinks, (which I had configured initially to to avoid the ugly post type links), didn't work on the ISP version of the site. I still haven't found a solution yet apart from using the using the default setting (ugly links).

I will continue to post articles on my experiences with WordPress as I go forward. This is more a personal diary of my experience with WordPress and I am not sure that this would be useful to anyone else.