I had a plan of designing a Wordpress Theme from very long time. Rather than using a live domain and your regular Webhosting, it is always a good idea to install Wordpress on a local machine and try out things from there. It is not a big deal to install Wordpress locally on your Windows 7 or Vista or XP machine.

Procedure to Install WordPress Locally

Step 1 : First thing you would need is Apache, MySQL and PHP. Instead of installing all the messy stuff you can just install XAMPP. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use. Install XAMPP from here – http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#646.

Step 2 : Open the xampplite folder and double click setup_xampp.bat. Just follow the steps and install other components. Now double click on xampp-control.exe and start the Apache and MySQL services.

Step 3 : So now You have got Apache and MySQL installed. Now we have to create a new database to use with our Wordpress Blog. Head over to http://localhost/xampp and select your language. Now on the left side you can see a tools section. Just click on the phpMyAdmin link and create a new database from the phpMyAdmin page.

Step 4 : Now we have to install Wordpress. Go to http://wordpress.org/download/ and download the latest stable version to your local computer. Extract the files and modify the wp-config-sample.php file with database name(techhaildb in my case), MySQL username(root in my case) and password (****** in my case). Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.

Step 5 : Now open the Xammplite folder and then copy the whole Wordpress folder to htdocs folder. Now head over to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and complete the Wordpress Installation.

If ou have followed all the steps correctly you will have a Wordpress blog installed on your local machine.