For many people, learning how to build a website sounds like a monumental challenge. After all, some days it seems as if turning on the computer is a victory. However, as web development has evolved over the years, the process has been made easier and user-friendly. As more and more people have decided to develop a presence online, building a website is a must. Whether you choose to build your website yourself or decide to use a digital marketing agency specializing in creative web design due to a lack of confidence or time, it’s imperative to have a website that looks great, conveys your brand, ranks well, and offers a great user experience. If you choose to use your own skills to build your site, WordPress is an excellent platform. For those of you who are ready to get started, here is a step-by-step guide to building a WordPress website.
To ensure your site turns out the way you wish, you’ll need to choose the correct website design platform that will make the task as easy as possible. If this is your first website, WordPress is a good choice. With plenty of scalability, it works well with websites that will have low to medium traffic levels. Free to use, it has many themes and plugins as well, and excellent support services if questions arise.
After choosing your platform, the next step is choosing a great website name and host. But be sure that prior to doing so, you’ve settled on the niche for which you are most passionate about and have a significant amount of expertise. When it comes to your website name, be sure to stick with extensions people are familiar with, such as .com, .net, or .org. When choosing the website name, there are several factors to keep in mind, such as:
–Keep it as short and simple as possible
–Make it memorable and catchy
–Be sure it’s easy to type
–Include keyword if possible for maximum SEO
As for hosting, definitely go with shared hosting. Far less technical and costly, hosting services such as BlueHost offer easy installation processes and domain registration. For best results, choose a starter package offered by the host, since this offers more than enough speed, functionality, and storage for your first website.
After you’ve chosen your website’s name and host, configuring your website is the next step. For this step, you’ll go to the WordPress Administration screen, then type in your username and password. Once you get to the main menu, your next step will be to customize your website’s appearance and activate the theme chosen for your site. To add custom features to your website, choose Customize from the main menu and add special layouts, colors, photos, and much more. If you want to make a visit to your website one everyone will remember, add some widgets. Preset modules or pieces of code, widgets are found in sidebars, footers, and headers. To add widgets, go to the main menu, choose Appearances, then choose Widgets.
As you know, when you visit a website, you want it to be as easy as possible to navigate. This should be especially important with the website design you’re creating, since it will probably be the difference between success and failure regarding your website’s popularity. After you’ve chosen Appearances, then Menu from the Admin screen, it’s time to add a menu to your website. In this step, you’ll have plenty of options from which to choose. To start with, you can decide where your menu will be located on your site. Since there is no one right choice for this, you can put your site’s menu on the top, bottom, or side of the page. Ultimately, this decision comes down to personal preference and the layout on your page. Once this is done, don’t forget to add other parts of your site such as About, Blog, and Contact.
While some sites have backgrounds that can make it difficult to view the page, smart web developers choose a simple, one-color background that helps keep the viewer’s attention on the content, rather than the background. Given your industry, you may want to explore the psychology behind various colors in marketing to see what resonates with specific consumer groups when finalizing your website design and target buyers.
A website’s success ultimately depends on its content and how it’s divided up for the site’s user to access. To add pages, go to the WordPress Admin page and select Pages, then Add New. By creating specific template styles, you’ll be able to divide up your site’s pages based on their content. When creating content to market your products and services, make sure to study up on SEO-friendly content that provides valuable content to your audience. For example, using storytelling to enhance branding converts high numbers, as opposed to vanilla words. When building a WordPress website, it’s important to use a digital marketing agency if you have any questions as to how to build a website. Remember that when it comes to web development, WordPress makes it easy to use your talents and ideas to create an online masterpiece that will be informative and aesthetically pleasing.
