getting Started

This series will help walk you through the initial steps of WordPress and building a website. Registering a domain name and creating a safe and secure place to build.

Getting Started

This series will walk you through setting up your staging environment with WordPress and registering a domain name.

1) Registering a Domain Name (Optional)

If you have a particular domain name in mind for your site you should register it as soon as possible via Gandi.

2) Choosing a Staging Environment

Choosing between an offline and online staging environment and reviewing options.

3a) Local by Flywheel

How to setup and install WordPress with Local by Flywheel.

3b) Pantheon

Getting setup with a Pantheon account and creating a sandbox WordPress install.

Choosing a WordPress Staging Environment

Now that we’re ready to begin building our WordPress website, most people think the first step is purchasing website hosting, but at this point it’s a bit premature. What we need is a environment where we can build our website at no cost and where we can setup new WordPress installs on the fly to test and try out different plugins and themes while we’re training. We need to be able to have multiple installs and one main working install that we plan to go live with.

In order to do this we’re going to create a staging environment where we can build out website. The main decision we need to make is whether we want to work locally on our computer (where we install software on our computer that acts like a host would, except it’s all done locally on our computer) – or whether we want to work an online environment where we have a public URL we can share with others who may need to review, work on or visit our website during the building process.

We have two options for our staging environment depending on our preference, Local by Flywheel for local development via software on our computer or Pantheon.io, an online WordPress sandbox and hosting company. Regardless of which option you choose when it comes time to launch your website you can sign up with any WordPress hosting company you want (and we’ll review them and help you choose one) – so this decision has no bearing on where you want to host your site – it’s just where you want to have your site located while you work on it and build it.

Review the options below and decide which is best for you.

Local by Flywheel

Local by Flywheel is provided and maintained by Flywheel, a WordPress hosting company. The software is free to use and can be downloaded on to your computer and mimics the setup of a hosting company. So – you can install, build and work on multiple installations of WordPress at once, at no cost, and delete them when you’re done with them. 

When you’re ready to go live, it’s a simple process of a few minutes to move the website from your computer to your live host. 

Benefits of using Local by Flywheel

  • Can begin working on your WordPress website quickly and easily.
  • No up-front costs and no time pressure or monthly bills. Completely free to use.
  • When you’re ready to go live, you can use any hosting option you’d like, and we’ll show you how.
  • Can build multiple sites and quickly create new sites for testing all from your local computer.
  • Ability to work offline.

Cons of Local by Flywheel

  • Some people have issues installing the software. We haven’t run into this personally but there have been some complaints.
  • Support (of the software) is minimal as the main support is through a forum which doesn’t appear to be checked often or responded to very quickly. We’ll always try to help answer questions and troubleshoot – but as we didn’t create the software, there’s certain limitations to our ability to help.
  • There is the functionality in the software to have a Local by Flywheel site available publicly (as long as the setting is enabled and your PC and the software is running) but it can be a bit wonky to use and doesn’t work for everyone, so this is really more for working entirely offline.

We have personally used Local by Flywheel to build and put together hundreds of WordPress websites without a single technical issue – however because we have found several people running into issues we felt it was important to mention. It may be worth trying to install it and see if everything works for you – and then if you run into an issue getting the software setup, use an alternative.

You can learn more about Local by Flywheel by clicking the button below which will open up the Local by Flywheel website in a new tab.

Pantheon.io WordPress Sandboxes

The online option for building your WordPress website is via Pantheon.io – which offers everyone free to use, online WordPress staging environments to use and work on as long as you’d like – at no cost – and have it online so you can work on it anytime from anywhere. 

Benefits of using Pantheon

  • Can begin working on your WordPress website quickly and easily.
  • No up-front costs and no time pressure or monthly bills. Completely free to use.
  • When you’re ready to go live, you can use any hosting option you’d like, and we’ll show you how.
  • Can build multiple sites and quickly create new sites for testing all from your local computer.
  • Site is available online for sharing or asking for feedback and reviews from others.
  • Built-in version tracking which makes it easy to track file changes on your site.
  • Error reporting and warnings is the system notices something isn’t working properly, needs an update or PHP errors are being produced from your site.
  • Easy to use backups.
  • Pantheon Support is available even at the free level.

Cons of Pantheon

  • With some functionality of WordPress, such as WPML the multilingual plugin, additional plugins are required to allow them to work on Pantheon (we’ll let you know which). This isn’t a huge deal but something to keep in mind.

You can learn more about Pantheon by clicking the button below which will open up their website.

To get started, choose the option below which best suits your needs and you’ll be brought to a tutorial covering the steps to get started.

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