Have you booked your domain and struggling to create your first worpress website? If so this article is only for you. There are tons of tutorials already on web which are very long and not complete. A single tutorial is much more beneficial than tons of half cooked knowledge, right? I understand you are a busy entrepreneur, keeping that in mind I will keep this article crisp, consistent, complete and to the point.
And I promise if you follow along this tutorial and give me your undivided attention your website will be live within an hour.
WordPress is the most popular and simple free CMS to create a website. It offers lots of customizations. 50% of the websites on internet are built over wordpress including Sony music and BBC America. Creating a website is actually very easy and straight forward. I will give you a simple 8 step formula to create a website that stands out.
For this tutorial we will create website for a Gym. Have a sneak peak of our final design.
It has four pages – home, blog, contact and a free guide section where users can download a free eBook. If that sounds interesting sit back relax and let’s create our first website.
Step 1: installing WordPress
Before we start we need a domain name and an active hosting plan. If you don’t have those you can quickly book one. I use hostinger for my websites and it comes with a free domain name and SSL. Now just in case you don’t know domain is the name of your website (e.g. Facebook.com, google.com, digitalarnab.com ) and hosting is the computer system where all your files, databases, resources of the website are stored. There are plenty of options to buy a hosting e.g. WPX hosting, hostinger, Fastcomet, Bluehost, Namecheap, Godaddy, A2 Hosting. I find Hostinger the most affordable with great performance. Once you have hosting go to your cpanel (or hpanel) and install wordpress. If you are using hostinger go to the hosting section > auto installer. Click on wordpress. It will give you a prompt to choose your domain name. Choose your password, language and website name and click on install. WordPress will be installed within a minutes. Congratulations!! You completed the first step.Step 2: installing a Theme
A theme decides the look and feel of a website. Once you install wordpress a default theme is installed. And this makes your website looks like this. Looks pretty bad, right? Don’t worry we are going to revamp the design in a few minutes. Copy the url of your website, paste in browser and write /wp-admin after it and hit enter to go to the wordpress dashboard where all the fun is. yourdomain/wp-admin is the shortcut to access the wordpress dashboard. Login using your credentials which you created during installation of wordpress. Head over to Appearance> Themes. Choose a theme you like. Astra, OceanWP, GeneratePress are some popular themes. Free themes are great to start with; you can use premium themes as well if you like. For this tutorial I am using Hello from Elementor. It is a product of popular page builder Elementor and is a very light weight theme. Click install and activate. Now Hello theme is activated to your website. Now refresh your website in a new tab and you can see the changes.Step 3: customizing the settings
- Discussion Setting: Go the Settings> Discussion tick the check box Comment must be manually approved. This will help to root out spam comments. Next untick the next checkbox Comment author must have a previously approved comment. Scroll down and save the changes.
- Permalink settings: We want our posts to have a unique url which contains the name of the post. This helps a user to search about your post and helps in SEO as well. So go to Settings> Permalinks and select the post option and save changes.
- Date setting: To synchronize the time go the Settings> General and change the time zone according to your location and quickly save the changes.