Saturday, May 10, 2008

3 Steps to Create Drupal Sites

Drupal is one of the most easy to use and powerful content management system in the world. It's open source and a lot of people contribute to it from application development, theme development and module development perspective. And the most important one to us is that they are all free.

Want to setup an Drupal site, below are the 3 steps you can follow.

1. Find a Reliable Affordable Web Hosting

If you have chosen Drupal CMS for your website, it is very important to find a reliable Drupal-specialized host which will tend to provide expert hosting services. Usually, as for a beginner, a charge lower than $7/month should be good enough for your hosting. You can consider to upgrade them to VPS or dedicated server once your site gains enough traffic.

2. Installation

Installing an Drupal instance is not hard. You can go to Drupal.org, download the installation scripts, and upload them to your web hosting directory. The installation process can be done via Web. So you need to type in the URL in the Browser where you upload the scripts to, and system will automatically guide you through how to create the site. One thing you need to do ahead is to create a Database instance which will be used during the installation

Right now, Drupal has become more and more popular that some web hosting service providers start to include the installation scripts in their service package, by which you can it setup by just some simple clicks.

3. Choose an Appropriate Theme

Theme is used to decide the outlook of your site, everyone want to get an attractive theme for it. If you are technical enough (some CSS and php knowledge), you can create your own theme. Or you can download the theme the other open source contributors have built. A more realistic way is that you can download a free theme and make some adjustment to theme to make it work better to you. You can go to drupal.org/project/Themes/ to find a list of great and free template.

Congratulations! You have owned a Drupal site now. Considering there are many other great features haven't been included in the initial scripts, in order to better leverage the functions of it, some knowledge of the modules will be needed, you can get to know more about addition modules at drupal.org/project/Modules, but for a beginner, above 3 steps will good enough for you to own a powerful CMS site.

Reference:

Best Drupal Web Hosting

Top 10 Web Hosting

Reliable Affordable Web Hosting Review, Guide and Awards

Sean.Raymond is an expert on online business. He has more than 10 years working experience of guiding people to create their own online business. webhostingclue.com is his web site where he shares the knowledge about how to find appropriate web hosting solution for a small online business and promote it online.

And you can contact sean.ray@webhostingclue.com if you have any question about this article.

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