Building Your Website With WordPress

Building Your Website With WordPress

by Tom Holen

In the past building a website required a reasonable amount of knowledge about programming languages such as HTML (hyper text markup language) and PHP coding, but technology has advanced to the stage where it is now virtually a walk through process for even someone who has limited technical skills.

The first thing you need to do before building your website is to purchase a domain name, this is similar in the real world to having a business name and will be the eventual address of your website on the web. You buy these names from domain registrars such as Go daddy or Name cheap but there are thousands you can choose from.

Once you have got your domain name you will need hosting, that is somewhere to place your website so it can be seen by potential visitors. Hosting can range in prices but basic hosting can be purchased from as little as $3.00 per month from companies such as Hostgator. When you have bought your hosting you will generally get an email with details of the setup for your hosting which includes the server addresses where your domain is going to be displayed - you will need to take note of the server IP addresses as you need to enter these to point your domain to your hosting.

As soon as you have your domain name and hosting and have pointed the DNS you are set to start building your site. Your hosting provider will have provided you with login details for your cpanel and it is here that you can find a software application called fantastico that you use to set up your basic WordPress site.

You will be offered a range of options as to which type of site you want to build, select WordPress, complete a few boxes with the name of the site, description and your email address and click go. Then fantastico will build your basic site and database and provide you with the relevant login details for you to make your changes and adjustments.

Once your initial site has been setup - you login to the back-end of the WordPress site and customize it with your own information. You can change the theme from the WordPress admin panel, and adjust your own information in the settings.

WordPress has hundreds of free and paid plugins that you can upload to perform specific activities within the site, but initially just use the basic ones that come with the program until you are familiar with what they all do. There are hundreds of WordPress tutorials available on the internet, so if you aren't sure about something just Google your question.

When you have the site looking the way you want it's time to start entering your images and data; you do this by means of creating posts or pages. It's quite a common practice to have a fixed post or page for the first page of your website and then having other posts rotate through as they are created. To create a new post or page you just click on the relevant link within the WordPress administration panel.

Uploading images is simple; you can go to media and just drag across the images you want to have included in your posts or even as your header. Whilst WordPress does have the capacity to readjust sizes of large images it is a good practice to have your images already sized to close to what you require as an end result.

If you make mistakes, don't stress - you just delete your posts and create new ones. The interface for creating your posts and pages is very similar to using a word program or similar so don't be afraid to experiment a bit.