How to Build A Quiz Website Using WordPress & Optional GoDaddy Hosting

Back in 1998, I got to build my first website for an independent bookstore. It was a great learning experience, but it lacked a lot of options I take for granted today.

I stuck with one theme (none, really), didn't use any FTP tools until the end of my time running it, and I may as well have been building in a vacuum. Google was there, but in its early days, search results could be pretty obtuse and skewed, and the tools I needed were few and far between. The closest thing to plugins were, well, code snippets and applets.

These days, I'm absolutely thrilled to be using WordPress. Every major feature is a wonder of the modern world to someone who got his start hand-coding his websites. If I want to switch from one complex visual theme to another, I can do it in under 10 seconds. Do I need a plugin to fill in one or more gaps in style or function? I can usually get one, sorted by rating, in seconds. Is there a new plugin that solves a lot of previous problems? New recommendations show up right in my control panel.

After trying my hand at WP and building a few websites, I've come up with a to-do list that can make a fleshed-out website in an hour or so, not including the time it takes for hosting companies to set up databases and set name servers.

I also have a quiz website that I keep meaning to get around to. After dealing with a well-meaning but sluggish quiz plugin (I shouldn't complain about something free), I put the website aside for a year or so. I'm still a little crunched for time, but it's back up, and I thought I may as well share my secrets on HubPages with those technically challenged people who have always wanted to build and maintain a quiz site.

(In the case of a DIY build, all instructions are for a GoDaddy-hosted website but can be adapted if you know your way around your own hosting system.)

In order to get your quiz platform set up, you'll need to buy hosting for your domain. Setting up hosting requires a wait of several hours, as name servers will take a while to kick in. Once this is in, you can either set up WordPress through an application like CPanel or Fantastico, or by downloading it from WordPress.org.

Setting up through CPanel or another app is good, but tends to get you a few more email nags than running it from a do-it-yourself build.

If you want to do it yourself, you will need to find an FTP tool. I love FileZilla; it auto-updates and has never given me any grief. Not only that, it's free.

The other thing you will need for a DIY install is to download WordPress from WordPress.org. Check the download links section in this article to download everything you need for a DIY installation.

Once you've downloaded FileZilla, you can go to your hosting package's control panel and go to the databases section. In order for WordPress to save the articles (quizzes) you post, it will need to save everything entered in into a database. So you will need to make a database name, username and password you can remember.

It may take a little while for the database to show up in your list of databases. Click "Manage with phpMyAdmin". The database name is also the username. Once you're logged in to that database, the name will show up right up top in big bold print.

Once you get that database info, just make a note of your password and move on to configuring WordPress for upload.

If you've already set up using CPanel or another application, skip this section.

Once your database has been established and you've gotten its full name, it's time to configure and rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php. Instructions can be found here, at WP's World Famous 5-Minute Installation Guide.

A sample GoDaddy database setup in the wp-config.php file may look like this:

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'celeb');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'celeb');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'Cr1spyChikc3n');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'celeb.db.90210411.hostedresource.com');

The convenient thing about WordPress configuration on GoDaddy is that the database name and username are one and the same. Trying to discover that tidbit of information can be a bit time-consuming, so there you have it.

Rename the file to wp-config.php if you haven't already, and save it.

Open up Filezilla. Enter your FTP username for your website and your FTP password, and connect. Get to the directory on your website where you want to install WP. In most cases, this will be the directory you see when you connect. Navigate to the WordPress folder on your hard drive so you can see several WordPress folders and a few files, including wp-config.php. Left-click the top folder once. At the very last file on the list, hold down shift and left-click once. Right-click once while everything is still highlighted. Choose Upload and left-click. Your files should all start uploading to your website. On an average connection it takes about 3 minutes. You can watch the progress info on the bottom of the screen if you need to manage your time by the minute.

The critical point is seeing whether your WordPress build has been installed to the right part of your directory, and whether your database connection is valid. Even at the worst, you should be seeing a message saying there was a problem connecting to the database, like in the image below.

If you don't see that message, it could be that you haven't uploaded WordPress to the right directory of your site, or you need to just visit a subfolder, like yoursite.com/wordpress. WordPress itself has an excellent troubleshooting section here.

If you have WordPress finally installed, I recommend you get these plugins. Just go to the Plugins part of your control panel and choose Add New at the top:

• All In One SEO Plugin - the one and only.
• Any sitemap builder plugin (your choice but I recommend Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold).
• mTouch Quiz - the linchpin of your website. To create quizzes, just go to the mTouch Quiz section in the menu bar on the left of your control panel. Choose "Manage Quizzes" to create your first one.
• WP FollowMe (or any equivalent Twitter plugin, as WP Follow Me is often hard to find in plugin search).
• ShareThis - all the likes, shares and +1s you could want in a single plugin.
• List Category Posts - a priceless plugin for building pages that show all posts of one category. So if you want to have a science trivia page, sports trivia page, or what have you, you can lead people looking for one category of quiz straight to an organized collection of quizzes. There is a support page listed in the WordPress plugin description with an ample list of options.
• Aweber (optional) - good for attracting a few more subscribers and informing them of new quizzes.

Choosing & Installing a Theme

There are thousands of themes out there for WordPress. They can be added from the Appearance section of WP's control panel. Here is what I recommend:

• Get a theme with harmonious colors. Anything that stings stinks (I'm not quite sure if I'm fully following my own advice on CelebIQ).
• Make sure the fonts are readable and large enough. Squinting at tiny text on a beautiful theme is still a nuisance.
• Make sure that any sidebar or widget text will fit (optional if you're in a hurry but I strongly recommended you just use some ipsum stuff to see how your sidebars look). 99% of plugins work fine, but some stunning themes are disasters when content is added.
• Make sure it's a light or white theme with black text. (This I know, for SBI and Rosalind Gardner tell me so).
• Ensure that the theme is whitespace-friendly and allows a nice flow of empty space around the text.

Sitemap Builder: Nothing necessary. Keep it to minimums and you'll be fine.

All in One SEO: I recommend using custom category slugs, and getting into the habit of customizing every post with keywords, a search description, and a title. My one secret for getting up there in the search engines: use the same 1-2 main keyword(s) in every legitimate post you can. I used to worry about being penalized in search engine rankings, but I stopped losing sleep over it eventually. It's seemed to me that as long as I've had quality content for each post, search engines have responded well.

Simple Tags: Updated until only 3.1, so use at your own discretion. A good way to speed up tagging, just plug and play; you'll easily notice where it's active.

mTouch Quiz: The most important thing to do with Quiz is to have a decent scoring summary at the end. For my Rodney Dangerfield quiz I have the quiz spout off a one-liner for each rank. If you use it right out of the box it will sound artificial and not as relevant as it could be. And in order to add your quiz to a post, all you need to do is take the shortcode that the quiz makes and put it in your post. It will look something like [mtouchquiz 1], [mtouchquiz 2] and the like.

List Category Posts: An excellent organizational plugin, this baby is almost like Drupal's best organizational qualities in a box, minus the crashes, time-sucking maintenance, and weak documentation. >:)

WP Follow Me: A quick and easy way to emphasize Twitter. All you should need to do is put your Twitter URL into this or any other plugin and you should be fine.

ShareThis: All the other 600 social media sharing services you need. :D Automatically integrates at the end of each post, and new installs no longer require a lunky API key.

WP-SpamFree: As close as I've been able to come to matching Akismet's services, only I don't have to pay extra every month for it. The plugin is no longer supported, but still available, and still working as of 3.21. The best thing about it is the spam-free contact form generator, which you can use for a quiz suggestion page.

Overall, this site will be pretty easy to build by interacting with one main plugin at a time. The site map, Aweber, ShareThis, and FollowMe are pretty much set and forget. List Category by Post will only need tuning when you add, subtract or merge categories. The brunt of your work will be between making quizzes and researching related searches to put in as keywords for your All In One SEO.

I've waited about 13 years for web builders to reach a point like this, where you don't need to buy quiz software and be hampered by a lot of free-use restrictions. I'm glad to have a setup where I can make money first before donating to plugin creators, instead of the other way around. Have fun and let me know if you make your own quiz site! I'll be glad to amend this hub to answer frequently asked questions. Thank you for reading.