In this post we are continuing our work with XAMPP to allow us to run a live website on our desktop or laptop.

Today we are backing up the WordPress database as well as the website files and will move them to the local desktop for use with XAMPP as a development website.

In the following video we walk through finding the MySQL database, exporting the database and coping the website files to the local desktop.

This post is the first in a series of posts I’ll be doing to show you how to setup and run WordPress on your desktop or laptop.

You may wonder why on earth would anyone want to run WordPress on their desktop? Well there are a lot of reasons why you might need WordPress running on your desktop. One really good reason that we are going to check out here today is to create a sandbox to help you redesign a live website.

If you have a live WordPress website with a lot of visitors, there are times when you may need to improve the design or layout. But how to do you do this without impacting all of your readers and customers?

Operationally you always want to work on your site during non-peak hours. The web is open 24 hours a day and that means your website is too. To find the the best time to work on your website, fire up AWSTATS in your CPanel and look to see when you have the least amount of visitors to your website.

You lowest traffic day and hour will depend on your readers and your niche.

To make it easy to redesign our web site without worrying too much about the time of day we work on it… we are going to use an open source application called XAMPP that allows us to easily run an Apache web server, a MySQL database and PHP together on our desktop or laptop.  All three of these are the key ingredients for running WordPress.

In the following video I show you where to find XAMPP and how to get it installed.

Ah the gold ole days.  Google would rank your sites, eBay would pay nice affiliate commissions and you could do it all by using Build A Niche Store (BANS).  Those were the days.

Today its all about WordPress.  And many of us still have BANS sites out there.  But how do you migrate your sites from BANS to WordPress without making a total mess of your website?   It can be a little tricky.   So here are a few tips to help show you how you can move to a WordPress blog without too much headache.

Do BACKUPS!

Before you do any work on any of your websites you need to back things up. I can’t stress it enough. Always, always, always do a backup! Simply ftp into your site using filezilla (or your favorite ftp software) and copy down the entire contents of your website folder.  If you have an addon domain or subdomain, just copy the folder of your addon domain.

Now that you have everything backed up, if anything goes wrong you can just copy it back and things should be back to normal.

THERE’S NO EASY WAY

There isn’t an EASY button to push to move everything from BANS to WordPress.  It’s a very manual process. The two systems are not compatible.   The easiest way to move things from BANS to WordPress is to do it by hand.  First build a WordPress site.  Then copy all of your articles and content (either cut and paste or just type it in) to a new WordPress posts. Finally rebuild any of the product pages.  It can take a while do to, but look at it this way, it will give you a chance to really make the site better.

So the first thing we can do is begin by installing WordPress in a new directory under your BANS site.  I usually call this new directory “blog”  or “newsite” or something that isn’t used.  What this does is it allows you the freedom to build and design your new WordPress site without disturbing the live BANS site, especially if the BANS site is making money.

Once you get your new WordPress site built and everything is tested and looks good, we need to do another backup. This time we need to include the new WordPress site you just built.   You don’t have to copy everything down if you don’t want to.  Just copy of the new “blog” folder (or whatever name you gave it)  to your home computer.

Now comes the fun part

What we are going to do delete (scary part – scary music) everything in your website folder EXCEPT the new “blog” folder. Be very careful. Go to the folder that has your website,  select all files except the “blog” folder and hit delete. Your heart should be racing right about now!   Don’t worry you have everything backed up right?

This next step is critical – Log into the admin dashboard of your new WordPress site and go to the settings tab.  Change the WordPress address (URL) and the Blog address (URL) to be at the root of your domain (removing the “blog” directory name).

Next move all of the files from the “blog” directory up to the root of your website.  This would be the folder above your blog folder.  Do this by select all files in your blog folder (not the blog folder itself) and move them to the parent folder above your blog folder.

Once your finished open up your site in your browser and  you should see your new WordPress site where you BANS site once was.

This sounds more complicated than it really is and really is a bit hard to type out so I’ve recorded a quick video showing exactly how I move a WordPress blog from a directory called blog to the main folder for my site.

I have to say I really love working with WordPress.  It’s so flexible, versatile, and easy.

There’s a lot advice that gets thrown around on how to make money online.  People telling you what you need to start your own online business or which product to buy, blah blah, blah.  The thing is, the most common questions I get from my readers are simply: “How do I get started?  Where do I start? How do I setup a website?” So with this article we are going to start with the basics and explain how to setup a website.

I remember trying to explain to my Mom once what the internet was and what a web site was.  I had to laugh because these questions seemed so simple to me… until I tried to explain it.  It was a little harder than I thought.

But seriously, the Internet is very similar to the public phone system.  Everyone is familiar with the public telephone system.  It’s not owned by any one company or organization. You can pick up a phone and call anyone in the world if you know their phone number.  Whether they use AT&T or Verizon, it doesn’t matter,  the call will go through. The Internet is just like this, it is just a network (like the public telephone network).  People use their laptops or desktops to connect to servers that are on the web (web servers) to look up information (kind of like directory assistance).

These web servers have websites that are setup on them.  They are a lot like your laptop or desktop at home. They are really a computer, with a hard drive, cd rom, etc..  But whats different about these computers is that they are “tuned” or setup to serve files (web pages) through their network card.  These high performance race cars of the Internet are designed with one thing in mind and that is to transmit data over their network connection.  They don’t have sound cards or fancy video cards.  But they DO have a fancy network card, and most likely a lot of memory and hard drive space.

Web servers can be installed on just about any computer.  Windows, Apple, or Linux it doesnt matter.  The most popular web server is the Apache webserver.   Probably because its free!  And setting up an Apache web server is fairly easy.   Oh yes, I can hear you screaming, “But what about Windows?”  Yup, Windows also has the Internet Information Server that comes with the Windows Server Operating system too. It is also free (well , it’s included in the price of Windows).

Webservers are what make websites possible.  They serve up web pages.  These web pages are simply files that end with the file extension .html.  The “html” stands for hyperText Markup Language.  But that is probably way more than you really care about or need to know right now.

HTML files are just simple text files.  You can create these with Notepad on windows (or any text editor). Try this yourself.  Open Notepad, just type some text (dont worry about html tags or anything like that) and save the file as “test.html”. Make sure it doesn’t have “.txt” at the end.  Then open the file with your browser.

TADA!

Now, How to Setup a Website?!? Web sites are really just nicely organized web pages (those .html pages) all linked together and served up by a web server to anyone who requests them.  When you first configure a webserver you designate one folder or directory on the server that will contain all of the files that the web server will serve up. Most of the time this folder is called “public_html”.  It can be called anything, but just know that what ever is in this folder is fair game for public consumption.

So anyone can setup a web server.  But really the hard part is keeping it running. Protecting it from power surges during a storm, keeping it cool, and keeping it secure (don’t want anyone stealing your website) thats’ the true challenge. And it gets expensive.  You need a dedicated internet line (can’t have a dsl or cable hookup). You need a dedicated IP address and don’t forget DNS and Email.  GEEZE!

What many people do to help them setup a website is to “rent” a webserver from a web hosting provider.  There are a lot of companies that make good money renting servers to webmaster.  One great hosting provider I use is Hostgator.  I love them.  They provide everything, the physical server, the protected clean power, they back it up, they secure it, provide ample bandwidth, monitor it, and best of all if anything goes wrong I just call them and they fix it!  Its great.  All for only $10  month.

That’s about it.  Next time I will go over how to choose a hosting company for your business.  Price isn’t everything.

As always, I’d love to hear from you.  Did this article answer any of your questions? What kinds of problems have you had with setting up a website? Comments help websites come alive and allows us all to share our ideas.  I’d love to hear yours.  Thanks!