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July 08, 2020

How to Make Website in 2020: Tutorial Guide to Easy Setup

Introduction

If you're looking for a way to start your website and you don't think you have enough programming or web design skills, this article is just what the doctor prescribed. We'll go through the website creation process one step at the time, and show you how easy it is to start your internet presentation and build a website you can be proud of.



Step 1: Choose WordPress CMS

WordPress (WP) is an online content management platform, which means it's a piece of software that allows you to set up your website, as well as manage and publish your content. Because WordPress requires practically zero programming skills, it's the most popular website building platform, driving more than a third of all web pages on the internet. Moreover, it offers a wide array of free plugins and themes that we're going to say more about later in the article. For now, it’s important to know that WordPress provides a high level of customization, which means you can modify your website easily.

As we already said, WordPress is a content management system, however, you need to store your website data on a hosting server. The hosting server is, essentially, a computer that's connected to the internet and since you need a stable connection most users hire hosting services to keep their website data. Although, there are users that prefer to keep their website on their server, therefore, there are two ways of installing WordPress.

For those of you who want to host your website without paying for hosting services, WP installation takes a few small steps:

· Go to the WordPress website and click on the "Get WordPress" button. Download and unzip WP.

· Create a WP-database on your server and assign a MySQL user with full access. This will allow you to upload content for your website later.

· Upload WP installation files to the desired folder on your server computer (preferably root folder).

· Access the root folder and run the WordPress installation file.

Those of you who need a hosting company to run their website will have an easier job installing WP, so let’s jump to step 2.

Step 2: Pick a name for your website, buy a domain and hosting

Hosting service is an agency that owns internet servers and allows users to purchase or lease their resources to host a website or an app. So if you wish to start your website you should reach out to several hosting agencies and see which one is the best fit for your needs. Each hosting agency has its own set of service packages that offer a certain amount of traffic, CPU power, RAM (News - Alert) and other features that determine the performance of your website.

In case you need a lot of disk space for images and videos, choose an option that provides more disk space but pay attention to CPU power, because you want your content to load as fast as possible, especially if you plan to host a massive website.

You should look for a solution that offers enough resources to store a lot of content and maintain a fast load time. According to most recent Google statistics, page bounce rate increases by 32 percent when it takes longer than 3 seconds to load the entire web page.

Your website domain name is what visitors will type into the address bar to reach you. Therefore, try to come up with a domain name that’s exactly or close to your brand name, just like Facebook (News - Alert) uses “www.facebook.com”. If the domain name is not available because some other website is already using it, try something catchy but containing a keyword that relates to your industry or brand. It’s like starting your SEO strategy before even launching your page.

Once you've decided for the optimal hosting agency, bought a domain name, and chosen a service package it's time to install WordPress.

· Go to your hosting agency control panel (you’ll receive login instruction via email)

· Find the Content Management tab

· Click on Install WordPress

Step 3: Get familiar with the WordPress UI

When you install WordPress using your hosting agency control panel or manually, it's time to get familiar with the user interface. WordPress offers a series of tools that allow you to design and manage your website content so it's important to learn as much as you can and always adopt new knowledge.

On the left side of the WP dashboard there is a menu with different tools:

· Posts: Allows you to create, edit, and publish new posts on your website.

· Media: It allows you to upload and manage media content like images, GIFs, audio files, and videos.

· Pages: Creation and management of website pages.

· Comments: Comment section settings and management.

· Appearance: Adjustment of design properties.

· Plugins: Shows all installed plugins, allows search and installation of new plugins as well as managing the activation and deactivation of plugins you already installed.

· Users: Allows user management.

· Tools: shows a list of available tools for content management

· Settings: WordPress settings management.

Try and examine each of the tools at your disposal, until you learn how to make website presentable and ready for launch. Don’t worry if you think you messed up while learning the basics of WordPress, you can always reinstall the CMS from your hosting agency control panel and start fresh.

 Step 4: Pick a theme for your website

If your web design skills are not at the highest level, WP offers a rich repository full of themes both free and premium. Each theme can be edited and adjusted to fit perfectly with your brand. Pay attention to colors, font, as well as the layout and available pages.

A good thing is that WordPress themes are stored according to the category so you can choose the most appropriate photography themes, blog themes, themes designed for music industry-related websites and other spheres of interest.

Also, every theme offers a demo which lets you see how your website would appear after the installation of the theme. This way, you could test theme after theme until you decide because you could see which theme requires more adapting and which ones you don't even need to fix.

A website theme should express your brand, so make sure the color palette is optional or easy to modify. Keep in mind that your theme should load fast enough to keep the audience interested and secure a good search engine ranking. Consider going for a minimalistic design features because they provide the essentials and don’t put too much strain on your website loading time.

A good website theme should support multiple language languages (aka translation ready) and be able to function seamlessly across all popular internet browsers. Make sure to read the description carefully and confirm you’ll be able to present your content to users with different OS and browser solutions.

Choose a design that fits your aesthetic aspirations, but also make sure it's responsive, which means it will work well on both mobile and desktop devices. This is important for your website ranking because mobile-friendly websites rank higher due to the overwhelming use of mobile devices for online browsing. Don’t worry, you won’t have to manage desktop and mobile versions of the site, the system will adapt automatically.

There’s a free Google (News - Alert) tool that allows you to test your website for mobile-friendliness. Here’s what you should do to check if your theme runs as well on mobile as it runs on desktop devices:

· Go to Google mobile-friendly test page.

· Paste your website URL into the central text box on the screen.

· Wait for the results to come in and act upon suggestions provided by software (unless you are happy with the way things are).

The test will show you how much time your website takes to load if there are any security threats, and how it ranks compared to its competitors.

Make sure that the theme works well on mobile, especially after making changes to website layout or design elements. Still, test each theme for performance, to make sure it loads fast, and the navigation is seamless. Your theme should provide a high-quality user experience with only the most necessary content in front, there's no need to throw everything you've got at the visitors.

In case you are not happy with any of the solutions or you wish to change certain aspects of the theme design, you can install “page builder plugins” and change your theme using drag and drop technique. This way you can create custom themes, seamlessly and without any knowledge of web design.

Step 5: Get plugins to extend your website

Plugins are small pieces of code that extend your website functionality and appearance. There are all sorts of plugins, some of them allow you to implement SEO strategy like Yoast plugin, and others let you change typesetting, make your content load faster, or improve your website in some other way.

There are two main categories of plugins:

Frontend plugins – Those that improve the aspects of your website that users directly interact with. These plugins allow you to create different types of forms, change website appearance, or allow social network sharing.

Backend plugins – These are pieces of software that improve website performance in different ways like improving load time, or security.

WordPress holds a plugin repository that could serve as a place to start looking for those you need, however, don’t install more plugins than it’s necessary because too many additions will slow down your website. Also, update your plugins regularly, obsolete plugins could exhibit limited functionality or cause a security issue, even jeopardize the stability of your website if the plugin version doesn’t match the current edition of WordPress.

To install plugins you should follow these steps:

· Go to the WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins on the left side menu.

· Browse through the selection of plugins or search for the one you need by name.

· Download plugin and wait for the automatic installation to finish (You will be notified when the installation is complete, it usually lasts a few seconds).

· On the left side menu of the dashboard, under Plugins find your plugin, click on it to enter settings.

· Save your settings (if any available, depending on the type of plugins) and activate the software (some plugins activate automatically).

If at any time you don’t need a certain plugin, it’s best to remove it to keep your website as light as possible. Also, make sure that plugins you’re trying to use are compatible with your website theme, otherwise you might waste time trying to run a plugin that’s not supported.

Never forget to read user reviews and pay attention to the overall plugin development team rating. Plugins become a piece of your website code and should not be installed unless the developer is trustworthy. Check if your plugin has been recently updated if the update process is automatic or you should initialize it on your own. Developers often abandon plugins, which means you won't receive updates so try and avoid such pieces of software and only install plugins you know provide active support.

Step 6: Create basic pages

If you choose a theme that’s most suitable for your niche, you should already have all the pages you need, however, if you need additional pages, go to Pages menu, and create a new page, name it accordingly, and place it within the Main Menu so it’s visible to everyone.

Basic pages should be the ones that appear within the main menu. Let’s take a look at some of the fundamental website pages:

1. The home page is usually the place where you introduce your brand to visitors and post the content that you wish to point out.

2. The contact page also important to have, it’s where you’ll present your contact information, so clients would be able to reach you.

3. FAQ page might resolve some questions or concerns a visitor might have.

4. About us page is a good way to bring your team and company culture closer to the audience.

In case you’re offering multiple products or services, it’s good practice to categorize your product pages to simplify navigation. Furthermore, with your products or services categorized, it would be easier for users to find what they are looking for. Recent developments in AI technology allow automatic categorization of the content to enhance SEO results because search engines rank higher websites that categorize their posts.

Step 7: Consider starting a blog

A blog is a nice way to interact with your audience and get them to know more about your brand and your views on industry-related topics. Create a Blog page and publish new posts regularly to reach a broader audience and improve your website traffic.

With a blog that provides meaningful content to your visitors, you could expand your reach if your posts get shared on social media. There is also a backlinking value to owning a blog because your posts might serve as sources of information to other publishers. The more of your links are published on other websites the higher is your rating. According to statistics, the business that commits to running a blog gets 97 percent more links to their website that those that avoid publishing blog posts and 55 percent more visitors.

Another promotional advantage of running a blog on your business website is the ability to host industry-related influencers and thus build trust and strengthen your brand. Influencers can publish your collaborative effort on their website and help you gain even more audience.

Step 8: Adjust your site navigation

Allowing your visitors to reach desired content and navigate through your website with ease is one of the most important aspects of a good user experience. This is why you need to provide seamless navigation to visitors, and here is how to do it, starting from the WordPress dashboard:

· Go to Appearance on the left side menu and click on the Menus button in the submenu. You’ll see the workspace on the left changing.

· Set a Menu name within the Menu Name tab and click on the Create Menu button.

· You will now be able to drag and drop pages that you want to add to your Main Menu so the visitors could use them to navigate through your website.

· Once you’re done adding pages to the list, just click Save Menu.

You can add links or categories to your menu as well, not only pages. When organizing your website navigation, make sure to allow visitors easy access to entire website content. Use hashtags and groups to cluster similar content so the audience could receive suggestions according to their topic of interest. People would stay longer on a website that's easy to move through and promotes interesting content.

Conclusion

These were the most necessary steps you need to go through to set up your WordPress-powered website. It doesn't matter if you're into eCommerce, blogging, or any other industry WP allows you seamless website management. As you publish your content pay attention to SEO requirements and always look for ways to improve your website performance and features.

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