WordPress is fantastic, free, and open source. It can be installed and can run in a matter of minutes. Here’s a guide through the process of creating your WordPress website. We’ll address creating a homepage, a blog, and interior pages. Follow the steps that apply to what you’re trying to do with your site.
1. Envision your website
You can’t start building until you have a sense of what it is you want to be creating. Decide on what you want the website to do and contain. Depending on the purpose of your website, you can decide to have some very specific requirements such as customer reviews and featured advertisements. Though WordPress was originally designed to be a blogging platform, it has become much more. Web design with WordPress is relatively simple especially if you get the guys at www.WSIdigitalweb.co.uk to do it for you.
Write down the different types of content you’ll be offering. These include:
- Products
- Reviews
- General blog posts
- Videos
- Podcasts
- A la carte services
- Membership-based services
- Tutorials
- Downloadable content (free or fee-based)
2. Create posts and pages
Use the WordPress admin panel to set up a few posts with different tags and in a few different categories. In addition, set up a few internal pages. Your site should be designed with the content in mind as it will help you to figure out whether you’re laying things out properly. You can learn about writing content (posts and pages) in the WordPress Codex.
To begin with, create and publish a page called “Home” and a page called “Blog.” You can also create and publish any other pages you want on your site. For example, you may want “contact” and “about” pages, which are standard pages on websites. Finally, click Reading in the settings menu, and set the page called “home” as the front page of the site.
3. Lay out the homepage
Click on the header of the WordPress admin panel. The menu in the header has submenus such as visual editor, options and tools; they help you get to your destination more quickly. Visual editor is where you will do all of your layout and design work for the site. This includes laying out your site, inserting things like videos and relatively static graphics, and applying styles. Remember, most of your content will live in WordPress.
Use grid mode of the menu visual editor to edit the front page layout. Draw as many boxes—or blocks—as you need to complete your layout. Then, click the gears icon in the upper-right corner to open the block’s options, and configure the block. Your homepage could look something like this—a homepage consisting of a header block, a navigation block, widget blocks, a content block, and a footer block.
4. Create navigation menus
For an overview of how to create and use WordPress navigation menus, see the WordPress Codex article. Once you have added a navigation block to your layout, click the gears icon to open up the navigation block options in the options panel. At this point, you have a few options; for example, you can set the menu to be horizontal instead of vertical.
Add an alias to describe the location of the block. The alias becomes the name of a theme location for a menu in WordPress, then save your changes. Go to the WordPress admin panel, and click the menu in the appearance menu and set up a navigation menu. Then, select the menu you just created in the theme location box where you see the layout and alias of your navigation block.
A single navigation menu can be assigned to multiple theme locations or you can have multiple menus to pair up with multiple navigation blocks.
5. Lay out blog page
Define the layout that will be used for the Blog Index and the rest of the site’s pages and posts. Click the Grid Mode and look in the layout selector, and find the option for Blog Index. Hover over it, and click Edit. Make sure that you have at least one content block on this page. Add anything else you want; add a header same as your homepage or a different one or leave it blank. Add additional navigation blocks for category navigation, such as embed blocks or custom code blocks or whatever will give you the capabilities and content you need to match what you envisioned for your site.
6. Edit other layouts
Create a page in WordPress. Add some content, and publish. If this page should have a different layout than your default, go to the Visual Editor, find the page listed in the layout selector, and edit. Once you’ve added all of your blocks and completed all the block settings, and save. Rinse and repeat until you’re done customizing all of the pages that need customizing.
7. Define styles
Now you have your layouts done, and it’s time to start getting some style with Design Mode. Design mode is extensive; it has hundreds of options since you have a set of default options for all text and options for all block types. You can expect to see options for; background, font, margin, borders, padding, nudging, text shadow and box shadow.
Use the Design Editor of the Visual Editor to drill down through the elements on the site and choose the styles for each element. You can style things at the top level or at a detailed level. You can also select which instance of an element you are modifying. To do this, you’d expand the Content item under Blocks in the element tree; then expand the Instances item. Select the homepage instance from the resultant list to modify the block’s style only for that layout.
8. Finalize content
Go through the site page by page to make sure all looks well as you may want to make layout changes or realize that you didn’t style the links as desired in the different content blocks or perhaps you will find something you or your client simply don’t like and want to change. Once your content is pretty solid, you’ll be adding final touches or even integrating special functionality like plugins to enhance your website’s design.
9. Set SEO properties
Chances are you’ll want the public to find your website. Add some settings to WordPress admin panel to improve your site’s position in search results. You can reduce traffic on your site by going to the WordPress admin panel by clicking Reading in the settings menu, and changing on the discourage search engines option.
For sitewide settings, go to the WordPress admin panel. Click Options in the header menu, and click the search engine optimization tab. Here, you can set title formats and descriptions by layout. Advanced options are available too, for instance for telling search engines not to index pages and enabling no follow for links.
Now your website is live and ready to be announced to the world or at least its intended audience.
