wamp up your website

If you use WordPress, you’ll know how incredibly easy it is as a web beginner to update your site live — i.e, make changes to it while it is online and visible to everyone.

But if you want to make a WordPress site from scratch, it’s better to do that offline so you can play around with its look and content before releasing it to the world.

There is an easy way to do that too. It involves setting up software, called Wamp, that makes WordPress run on your own computer as if online.

All the Wamp instructions I find online seem to complicate the process. After struggling with other people’s tech-heavy instructions, I finally took some time to put them into plain language.

Here are they are (… give them a go, it will make website development for beginners so much more powerful; and do get in touch if you have any problems following them)

1. Download and install WAMP (WAMP is the software that lets you run WordPress on your computer).
2. Open WAMP. (Installing it should have automatically put a WAMP icon on your computer.)
3. Open phpMyAdmin:
   • Type ‘localhost’ in your web browser and press Enter
   • Click the phpMyAdmin link from the Tools menu at bottom-left of the localhost webpage
   • Enter ‘root’ in username and click Go.
4. Create a database for your website.
   • In phpMyAdmin, click the Databases tab.
   • Under ‘Create database’, give your database a meaningful name associated with your website (i.e make it easy to remember!).
   • Click Create.
5. Download WordPress.
6. Unzip WordPress and name the unzipped folder after your website (i.e make it easy to remember).
7. Put the unzipped folder in your wamp64/www folder on your computer’s C drive.
8. In a web browser, open localhost/<WordPress-folder> (WordPress-folder is the name of the unzipped folder in steps 5 and 6).
   If this screen appears, you’ve done all the hard work and just a couple of easy steps left!
9. Choose your language (English!) and click Continue.
10. Enter information as requested
    • Username = root
    • A password is not required
    • Enter the database name from step 4.
11. Click Submit.
12. Follow the next steps as directed by WordPress on your screen and then — Bam! — you should be up and running.

If you have any issues with any of the above, do get in touch. Once you get past this techie stage you will have all the freedom of WordPress on your own computer. It really is magic!