question on wordpress

goods

just wondering if any of you who use wordpress could answer this -
can you install wordpress and design ur site without having hosting sorted.
can you work off line and then upload everything or do u need a the hosting
from the get go ?

nilhg

Presuming you are on windows, do a search for WAMP (windows, apache, mysql, php) and wordpress, it allows you to make a test install of wordpress on your local computer.

kjt

Yup as John has said, you can do it all offline and then just upload your theme when you sort out hosting.

Here's the link: Xampp

samhail

Check out the wordpress download page. link there to have it hosted at wordpress. dont know how much admin rights you have though
http://wordpress.org/download/

kjt

You can't do much with wordpress/themes/creating your own site when hosting with wordpress sadly..

xia

If you go for wordpress.COM it's inclusive hosting. But you're limited as for templates and can't install plugins. Plus per default your domain would be goods.wordpress.com. But for I think $14 you can get and link it to goods.com or whatever domain name you want / get / buy. So this is a nice option if you're only starting off.

If you go for wordpress.ORG you are much more flexible (themes, plugins, customising) but need to organise your own hosting / domain. As the others said you can install it locally on your computer first. And XAMPP is a good option for that.
Just be aware for hosting that you need an Apache server, Windows server can't handle wordpress well.

goods

cheers guys . going to have a look at that xampp - and will prob sort out some hosting soon, tried that free wordpress bolg and there isnt much you can do with it really.

Heebie

Working in the hosting industry, I can give you this advice. After listening to how many horror stories our tech supports guys hear from people trying to run Wordpress (or Joomla or Drupal) on Windows (WAMP) hosting... get Linux-based hosting (LAMP) if you're going to use WP... it'll just work a lot better.

You certainly can design your site without having hosting for it yet.. but you might end up with unrealistic expectations of performance when others view it if you're looking at it over a local LAN connection, or on the same computer that's hosting it. If you are going to design it locally before getting hosting... get something like VMWare Server, install it on your Windows machine, and create a Linux VM with a LAMP stack on it in order to do the design..that way when you upload it to the "real" hosting site, it will be on like-for-like.
If you design on a WAMP stack, then host on a LAMP stack, you might see a few minor issues crop up. (Whereas if you design on LAMP and then try to host on WAMP.. it's like to simply explode because Windows is fairly crap for hosting websites... although Microsoft would certainly disagree with me.)

CabanSail

Moving this over to Web Development.