WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world to build and maintain websites. WordPress is free and more than half of all websites with a CMS used WordPress. With WordPress, you can create pages, fill and shape the layout of the site.
WordPress works in your browser. So wherever you have internet, you can manage your WordPress website, blog or your online store. It doesn’t matter what kind of computer you have. Whether you have a Mac, a Dell or something else.
Most of the professionals also work with WordPress. That means; tens of thousands of free and paid designs and plugins that you can choose from.
Do you plan to have a custom website made? Then you are also right. Almost every web designer uses WordPress.
Step 1: Order WordPress hosting and a domain at a top WordPress web host
Step 2: Wait until WordPress is installed (does not take that long).
Step 3: Set up some WordPress settings.
Step 4: Choose a WordPress theme (design).
Step 5: Install a few WordPress plugins.
The WordPress software is free. The official WordPress website is WordPress.org, not WordPress.com - that is a commercial party.
Unfortunately, this does not mean that you can build a website completely free of charge.
If you want to start a wordpress.org site, you will have to spend 10 to 15 dollars a month. You will also need an excellent hosting package with all basic features. A professional looking design may cost you $30-$50. This amount is one-off.
If you are really short of cash, you can get hosting and a domain name for about $10 per month and plus a free theme.
3 things you need to build your own WordPress website yourself are as follows:
These three things are all arranged by one hosting provider.
I personally recommend SiteGround for WordPress hosting
SiteGround is one of the finest hosting providers in the world. SiteGround gets good reviews on the internet. They are technically strong, offer fast hosting and receive praise for their support. They are one of the best-rated web hosts in the world.
They have 24/7 support (in English) and they also have live chat. Handy if you work on your website a lot at the weekend or in the evening.
With GrowBig for $5.95 per month, you can host multiple websites. So you can save a lot if you want to start several websites. You should also take this package if you expect more than 300 to 400 visitors per day.
With the GoGeek package for $11.95 per month, you get more space, back-ups, and speed also a test environment (where you can test changes on your site before the launch).
The StartUp package is very useful if you do not want to spend too much and if you do not expect a lot of visitors in the beginning. This package costs only $3.95 per month.
With every package, you can install WordPress with a click.
Enter your username and password here. They are in the email you received. Then click on log in.
You will see the WordPress dashboard after logging in. Personally, I never use the options in the dashboard (with the header 'welcome to WordPress'). I click directly on the menu item where I need to be.
So let's briefly discuss the WordPress menu (which you see on the left).
The first option you see is the Dashboard. When you log in, you land on the subheading 'Home' of the menu item 'Dashboard', but just like I said before, I never use that.
The second sub-header ' Updates ' is interesting. On this page, you can do all updates of WordPress itself, of the themes you use and all the plugins that you have directly.
It is wise to perform all available updates once a month or every two weeks. That is pretty simple. You click on 'select all' and then click on 'Update Plugins'. Usually, all updates are ready within ten seconds. Performing updates ensures that your website remains safe and that you have access to all improvements and new functionalities.
Posts are blog articles.
If you want to blog, you can create, write, edit, schedule and publish blog entries here. If you click on posts, you will see all the blog articles that you have saved as a draft version and all blog articles that you have published. If you want to create a new blog, you can click on ‘add new’.
Here you see all the images (and other files, such as PDFs) that have already been uploaded. Why can you ignore this? Because you can upload images yourself in the text editor of blogs and pages.
This option is for making a list of links in the sidebar (almost no one does that nowadays and it can be done in a simpler way).
Pages are normal web pages. Think of the contact page, service pages, and the 'about' page. You can create, fill, edit and publish pages with a text editor.
The design of your website
On display, you can adjust a part of the design and layout of your website. When you click on view, a submenu pops up.
Themes: The entire design of your website. Here you can upload, download and activate themes.
Widgets: For widgets, you can control the contents of the sidebar and the footer.
Menus: With menus, you can determine the layout of your menu.
Plugins: Plugins are small software additions.
You can download plugins for almost every function. Like a page builder, statistics, social media buttons, and a contact form.
Users: Do you want multiple people to log in on your website? With users, you can add people and manage users. You will probably not use this option very much either.
With settings, you can:
We can ignore more than half of the menu items, we will use part once and we use a few menu items often.
There are some things that need to be done first. We have to set up a few settings and discuss some parts (the menu, for example). Otherwise, you might encounter problems later. And of course, we want to prevent that.
All in all, this takes about ten to fifteen minutes. Let's start by laying a solid foundation.
WordPress provides new pages with unclear URLs.
For example, a new blog page will get the following URL: https://xyz.com /? P= 6. The part “P = 6" is quite unclear. We can’t imagine what the page is about.
We are going to change this to a 'clean' and search engine friendly URL. And this is very easy to adjust.
The title of each new page is now automatically converted to the URL. For example, if you create a page with the title "Best food for dogs", the URL will automatically be: xyz.com/best-food-for-dogs. And so the reader can see directly at the URL what the page is about.
And now the first point of our to-do list has been crossed out.
Good to do, right?
At this moment, just create the pages. Later on, you can fill them.
OK?
Almost every website has an 'About' page. Let's, therefore, make it directly.
Fill in 'Enter your title here' About (or 'About us' or About me' ) and then right click on the blue 'publish' button.
Look, you made your first page. Yeah!
And now we are going to do exactly the same, but then for the contact page.
Click on the New page again and mention the 'Contact' page. Then click on publish again.
Note: You can even get a freelancer or can hire an online WordPress Setup services to do things for you!
If you visit your website now, you will probably see some strange things on the menu.
Without creating a menu, every page you create is automatically placed on the menu, but in the order of newly published pages to older ones.
The more pages you add, the more chaotic the menu becomes. Everything is going to run together at a given moment. It is not the order you want and it is likely that you do not want every page in the menu.
And that is why we have to create a menu ourselves. We can then determine exactly which links are in the menu and in which order they are.
Under Pages (at the far left), tick the About and Contact pages.
Then click on Add menu
Every page that you would like to have later in the menu should be added to the menu in this way.
Now we are going to add a slightly more difficult link, a link to your homepage.
Click Custom Links (bottom left, under the tab pages) and enter your entire domain name at URL. So https://www.xyz.com or https:// xyz.com. The best thing is to go to your website and copy the entire URL from your address bar (it can also be that you have https:// instead of https://). Technically, these are two different pages. So just copy and paste and then everything should be fine.
Type in the link: the word Home and click again Add to menu.
Every time you want to link to a webpage that does not appear in the 'pages' or 'messages' lists, you have to add a link in this way. For example, if you want to link in the menu to another website. But you probably will not use this option more often.
Now let's organize the WordPress menu.
You can create a submenu (that is an extension menu) by placing a menu item at the bottom right of the main link. You will then see that the block has also been moved slightly to the right. A submenu is useful if you want to show a lot of pages in the menu.
Click on 'Main menu' under 'Menu settings' (at the bottom of the page) (sometimes there is something like 'Primary navigation').
Is the menu as desired? Then click on 'Save menu'.
If you have a new page that you want to add to the menu? Then go back to the menu, add the relevant page and click on 'Save menu'.
