Create your own website easily with WordPress

If you work from home or are trying to land that elusive first project, creating a professional website is an important step. As the home for your business, your website can showcase your skills, provide details of your experience, and give potential customers and clients a convenient way to get in touch.

Also, being able to create or work with a website is a useful skill in itself. For many people who work from home, the ability to have a website up and running is an additional service that can be sold to their existing clients.

You don’t need to spend a fortune to develop a website for yourself. You can do it yourself, even if you have never had experience. Fortunately, there is a secret: WordPress. WordPress is a free system that streamlines and simplifies the web development process, and as you will discover, it can still be flexible enough for almost any website imaginable.

What does WordPress do besides blogging?

Many people have heard of WordPress, but do not understand all the capabilities of the system. Most people think of WordPress as a blogging platform when, in fact, it is much more than that.

Today, WordPress has evolved into what would be called a content management system or CMS. A CMS is a tool to store all the information required for your website and present it to your visitors in a professional and organized way. Other content management systems include Joomla and Drupal, but the reality is that WordPress is the easiest to understand, the easiest to work with, and the easiest to adapt.

Let’s see, in simple terms, how exactly WordPress works once it is installed:

• Access a convenient WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface to work securely with all the content on your website.
• You can create new web pages in a variety of formats.
• The content you create is stored in a database
• You can use the same interface to edit your content in the database
• When visitors access your website, information from the database is presented to them in a website layout. You can change this layout at any time and your content will automatically look right

In technical terms, WordPress is quite advanced. In the nine years since the platform was launched, this advanced functionality has been used in many interesting ways.

Why should you use WordPress?

You may be wondering why people choose WordPress as their CMS. The answer is because WordPress can make anything you want to do easier, faster, and more convenient.

The Reuters news agency uses WordPress to keep journalists up-to-date with the latest news as it happens. Music streaming service Spotify powers your entire website with WordPress.

WordPress makes creating, editing, and organizing your content simple and, as a result, less time consuming. That gives you more time to focus on other areas of your business. WordPress also gives you the opportunity to get professionally designed to make your website look great, often for free.

The best way to see how WordPress optimizes your website settings is by testing it yourself. WordPress is easy to install on your web host, or if you sign up on the WordPress website, you can explore its features with no setup required.

Installing WordPress is easy

There are a few different ways to get started with WordPress, depending on your budget, your experience, and if you use a web host.

If you are just testing WordPress and don’t have your own web host, visit signup.wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. You will be guided through the entire process of creating your WordPress site, which will be stored on the WordPress servers for you. It is also possible to pay for a custom domain name (your website address) during the registration process.

Alternatively, if you already have a web hosting plan that supports PHP and MySQL, you can install your own WordPress on your server. This can be done by visiting WordPress.org and downloading the necessary files. The website also offers a convenient guide to install WordPress in 5 minutes.

Finally, see if your web host offers an automatic script installer like Softaculous. If so, you will be able to log in from your web hosting control panel and install WordPress in just a few clicks.

Find a great topic

Once WordPress is up and running, you will need to log in with the details you chose during setup, usually at yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will see the WordPress dashboard, a control panel that allows you to work with your website, and a variety of different menu items on the left side. A good place to start is by selecting a theme from the Appearance menu.

Using the ‘Install Themes’ tab at the top of your screen, you can explore an extensive database of layouts and layouts for your website. From mainstream business designs to distinctive and unusual styles, there are currently 1,607 themes available. After finding one you like, installing it is as easy as clicking the ‘Install Now’ button.

In addition to these free WordPress themes that are available from your control panel, many websites offer a large selection of themes, some of which are free and some of which are “premium” themes that carry a fee. If you are just getting started with WordPress, a free theme is a good option. Of course, paying for a premium theme guarantees high quality, good performance, and ongoing support from theme developers.

For professional WordPress themes, check out these websites:

• ThemeForest
• WooThemes
• GetYourThemes

Once you’ve installed your theme, you can conveniently customize it to suit your specific requirements. You can do this using Widgets.

Use widgets

Many people choose WordPress because there are many professional looking themes available for it. However, it can be useful to modify the chosen theme to make it more individual.

When a developer creates a theme, they will name specific areas of the design that they can customize. For example, you might be able to change the menu at the top of your layout, a sidebar that sits on the side of each page, or the footer.

From the Appearance menu in your WordPress dashboard, select the Widgets option. On the right, you will see a list of the different areas of your theme that you can customize. On the left, there are a variety of widgets included that you can simply drag and drop into the appropriate section.

Standard WordPress widgets include links to other websites, an automatic listing of your pages, and a calendar of when posts have been published. You can also install other widgets for free, in the form of plugins.

Use widgets to customize your theme. Once you’re satisfied, it’s time to start thinking about the most important thing of all: your content.

Pages and posts

A common stumbling block for people who are new to WordPress is the distinction between two similar types of content: pages and posts. Whenever you want to publish something on your website, you will need to decide whether it is a page or a post and select the appropriate option.

Originally, WordPress only offered the ability to create posts, a term that is short for blog posts. Posts are content items that are time specific and have the current date and time attached to them when created. Creating a new post causes two things to happen:

• An individual web page is created with the content of your post.
• Your post is added to a single page that collects each individual post

This is perhaps clearer as an example: let’s imagine you have a blog section on your website, at yourdomain.com/blog. When you publish a new blog post, a single page will be created; for example this could be yourdomain.com/blog/my-post-name. But at the same time, your blog post will be added to the hub page at yourdomain.com/blog, giving your visitors the opportunity to see all your most recent posts in one convenient place.

Posts are also added to your website’s RSS feed; more on that in our next article on advanced WordPress tips. Pages, on the other hand, are static items that don’t have a date attached to them. These are the independent website pages that provide general information about your business.

If you’re still unsure, ask yourself this question before creating your content: Is this something that will stand alone (one page), or something that is part of a section of the website that I will update regularly (one post)?

Explore and learn on the go

You now understand the concepts of WordPress, including what it can do, common terminology, and why you should use WordPress to build your site. So start exploring!

The best thing about WordPress is that it is intuitive and easy to use. Everything you create can be easily removed or edited, so the best advice is to check the menu options included in your dashboard and start working on your content right now.

Once you’ve started, be sure to read our next article on how to get the most out of your WordPress installation to create a website that really stands out from the crowd.