So you’ve registered a domain name and purchased web hosting.  Well done — you’ve taken the first step in setting up your own website.  If you missed it, you can learn how to do that in Step 1 of this 6-part tutorial.

Step 2 of this series will show you how to activate that website.

Step 2- Activate Your Domain

Once you have secured your domain and hosting services as described in Step 1, you need to tell your hosting company that you are ready to go live with you website.  We will walk through the process of activating your domain using GoDaddy.com.

1- To do this, open GoDaddy.com, and log in with the user name and password you created when you first set up your account with GoDaddy.

2- Click on the MY ACCOUNT/ACCOUNT STATEMENT button on the top right (see image below).

3- Scroll down and click on WEB HOSTING under MY PRODUCTS.

4- Click on the green LAUNCH button to open the hosting manager in another tab.

5- Click on the DOMAINS button (see image below). This will open the Domain Manager.

6- With the DOMAIN MANAGEMENT window open, you can see all of your existing domains. This is where you will be adding your domain if it is not on the list yet. If it is not, Click on ADD DOMAIN. (Note that your primary domain will have a yellow star next to it).

7- In the pop-up box, add your domain name (do not include the http://www). Make sure you create a unique folder name so that the installation of any applications for this for this domain will not conflict with any other domains. You do NOT need to add a folder name if you are only adding the Primary Domain. (Please see image below).

Click OK to add the domain in the Domain Manager.

8- Immediately after adding the domain, you will see that the new domain status is still pending.  You will need to wait a couple of minutes before moving on to the next step of installing WordPress for this domain.

Now that we’ve got our domain activated, let’s move on to Step 3 – setting up WordPress as the website content management system.