You’re on the home straight now.

You’ve made it to the Third and Final Stage of Installing a WordPress Blog.  You should have already been through Stage 1: Preparation and Stage 2: Uploading.  The tricky stuff is out of the way and all that’s left for you to do now is to complete the initialization of your new blog and set up your first user account.  Then the fun really begins.

• Run the WordPress Installation script by going to:
  http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/install.php(Or, if you chose to put your blog in a sub-directory of your main site, called Blog for example, then the address would be:
  http://www.yourdomainname.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php )
• The page you arrive at will ask you to enter a title for your blog.  You should have worked out what you want this to be by now, but you can always just use your domain name for the time being and change it later if you come up with a better idea.
  You’ll also need to enter an email address.
  This will be the email address assigned to the admin username, so I would recommend using one of your secondary email addresses at this point, as you’ll probably want to use your primary email for your own user profile, which you’ll use most of the time and will be setting up in a few moments.
• Make sure that there is a tick in the checkbox to “Allow my site to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati.”  (After all, if you didn’t want to be visible to search engines, you probably wouldn’t be reading this in the first place.)
  Now click the big button marked Install WordPress >> and let the magic happen.
• You should now see a page telling you that WordPress has successfully been installed (if it hasn’t, check out WordPress’ Installation FAQ to try and figure out what went wrong and how to fix it).
• Make a note of the user details WordPress gives you.  This will be for the username admin and will have a randomly generated password.
• Use these login details to access you new blog’s Administration Panel, by logging in at
  http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-login.php (or blah,blah,blah/blog/wp-login.php if you installed in a sub-directory, but I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now).
• First thing to do now that you’re logged in is to head into the Users section of the Administation Panel.  Unsurprisingly, this is when you control all of the user account details for your blog.
  Start by changing the password for the default admin username (make sure that it’s something that can’t be easily guessed or broken).
  Then set up a new user account for yourself.  This will be the one that you use on a day to day basis for your blog.  Make sure that you set yourself up as an Administrator as well.
• Now log out of the admin user account and log back in with your own username.  If you plan to have other people write on the blog as well set up user accounts for them too.  You don’t need to give them full Administrator rights, Editor or Author-level access will do.
• Next up, go into the Settings area and into the section called Permalinks.  Having a search engine friendly permalink structure can provide a welcome boost to your visibility and getting this setting in place now, before you start adding content to your blog will save on complications later.
  Select the custom structure radio button and enter the values for the way you want your post’s URL to look.  For this blog I’ve gone with /%category%/%postname%/ and would recommend this as a good way to make sure that you keyword targetted category names and post titles are given pride of place.  But whatever you do, don’t do this.
• One last thing to do for now is to switch on the Akismet spam filter that is automatically included with your WordPress installation.  There’s nothing on your blog yet, so you probably won’t be getting much spam anyway, but sorting this out now, saves worrying about it later.
  Just go into the Plugins section and you’ll see a list of available plugins waiting to be activated.  At this point there will only be Akismet and something called Hello Dolly, which is just a bit of randomness included by one of WP’s creators and you’ll probably not want to switch that on (but maybe I’m wrong ).  I’ll cover plugins in more detail in a later post, including a list of some of the most essential plugins to use if you’re practicing Search Engine Optimization.
  In order to activate Akismet you’ll need to have a WordPress API Key, which you can get by setting up an account at WordPress.com.  You’ll also need the API Key to activate the WP-Stats plugin (which is one of the ones I’m planning to include in the upcoming post about WordPress plugins).

So that’s it.  We’re all done now with installing WordPress and configuring the main details.  If you want to learn more about the things you can do in the WordPress Administration Panel head over to this page on the WordPress Codex.
But there’s still plenty more to do before you’re totally ready to go and start blogging.
Two of the most important things left to cover are Plugins to extend WordPress’ functionality and Themes, which change the way your blog will look.

Each of these are very important and deserve their own posts.  Come back soon for the Plugins post, which will be followed by the post about how to add themes to your WordPress blog.