Are you ready to take your online presence to a new level? Then it may be time to build your own website with WordPress as your platform. Creating your own website gives you the flexibility to organize your content in a way that you want and in a way that will make the most sense to your users. Your website can start simple with basic content and expand to become as complex with as many features as you would like when and if you are ready. Is a website something that anyone with minimal computer skills can create themselves without programming skills? With the ease of use of WordPress and the thousands of available plugins–absolutely! Let’s take a look at the process required to create your own website.
Why WordPress?
The title of this article is Build Your Own Website with WordPress–so why WordPress? As of 2020, over 35% of all websites on the internet use WordPress. That is a staggering 455 million sites! This is up from only 11% of sites that used WordPress in 2011. Some of the largest websites on the internet are built with WordPress. Maybe you have heard of them: Facebook, Ebay, Sony, Mercedes-Benz, Disney, Time, Dallas Mavericks, and I could go on and on but you get the point. WordPress is going to be around and its use is going to continue to grow.
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) and as such is designed to create and manage digital content online. It uses PHP as its server-side language, by far the most popular web development language, but requires its users to have no knowledge of PHP or programming in general to use. It is open-sourced, meaning it is free for anyone to install and almost all internet hosts will have it installed. Don’t be confused by the website at wordpress.com which is a blog hosting company that uses WordPress, but is limited in its uses. WordPress itself is housed at wordpress.org and is the official site for the self-hosted version of WordPress. This is the downloadable version of WordPress for those who want to self-host their own site. In reality since most of us do not have servers connected to the internet 24/7, we will use a host anyway (more about that later) and neither site will matter much to what we do. The host will have already downloaded and installed WordPress on their servers.
The learning curve for WordPress is relatively short and most users can have a basic site up and running in a few hours. It can, however, handle very complex websites and with available free plugins can do almost anything a user would ever need to do. WordPress is the best solution for most new and experienced website builders and can be used with the confidence that it will be there and continue to be supported for many years to come.
Using plugins give WordPress its real power and flexibility.
WordPress, along with its themes (more about them later), is a powerful website building platform on their own but it’s the thousands of plugins that give WordPress the power to do almost anything that is needed on a website. Plugins are software that can be added to WordPress that adds more functionality to what WordPress can already do. As of April 2020, there were around 55,000 free plugins available for WordPress.
These plugins can be searched by function from the WordPress dashboard, downloaded with one click and installed with another. So let’s say, for example, you need a form on your website. You would search for forms, read descriptions, ratings, reviews, number of installations, etc. on some of the forms plugins. When you find one you like, download it, and install it. You will now be able to include forms on your pages. Some plugins are simple and intuitive to use while others are more complex in both function and use but there are plugins to represent almost anything you would need to put on a website or use to build a website.
In creating my website, mymatheducation.com, for example, I needed a way to write complex math formulas that couldn’t just be typed. I searched plugins and found several plugins that would do Latex typesetting embedded in my documents. After searching the internet and reading about Latex, I discovered that it was exactly what I needed and had a short learning curve. I downloaded and installed it, and it became the perfect solution to my problem! I didn’t have to do additional programming or know very much about how it worked at all. I just learned to use Latex and it worked the first time I tried it.
For a list of plugins that I use along with the OceanWP theme on the websites I manage, click here.
WordPress themes control the way a particular site looks and works.
Themes are a set of files that control the way content is displayed without changing the underlying program. Every WordPress website starts with the installation of a theme which can be done in seconds. Although themes can be written from scratch, there is no need to do that as there are thousands of them available for free in addition to the one WordPress will install itself. In reality there are several very popular themes that many people use that will work quite well with popular programs to do most of things designers want. Themes control where things go on a page and how they look. The most popular themes are generally very flexible in how the page looks and two sites written using the same theme can look completely different.
My favorite theme is called oceanWP and has been around for a while. The basic theme is free and there is a more powerful paid version for anyone who needs its functions. All of my websites are done with the free version of oceanWP (including the one you’re reading this on!) and each one looks very different from the other ones and from those thousands of other websites that use the same theme. A popular theme among bloggers is Astra and is currently the most poplular theme out there while Neve is a modern, up and coming theme. I prefer to stick with the one that works for me because I have become very familiar with its functions and uses. Also, as you will see shortly, the theme is less important to me as long as it has flexibility, because I use a page builder plugin. I am more interested in a theme that I can turn off many of the functions.
A powerful page builder plugin called Elementor often replaces the WordPress editor.
Although WordPress can be used to create and edit web pages, the use of a page builder plugin makes that process even easier and more flexible. It gives WordPress drag and drop capabilities and a “box” model. A page builder plugin replaces many of the functions of the theme and allows greater control over the look of the page.
The best known and widely used of these is called Elementor. As soon as I have installed WordPress and installed OceanWP as my theme, the next thing I do is download and install the free version of Elementor and a couple of its addons and its header/footer builder. All of my pages are built with Elementor (again, including the one you’re are currently reading).
Elementor allows us to design a website using a box model where we can think of areas of our website as rectangles or boxes. These boxes or sections can have multiple columns and can contain all kinds of content such as text, headings, images, links, buttons, or even another box! It may sound complicated but it’s not. To add content, click a button to add a section, choose the number of columns, drag column boundaries to size the columns, and drag and drop content into a column. Continue to add more sections and content, resize as needed, change colors, backgrounds, borders, font sizes and color, and other things until you like the way it looks. Save and publish, and a page of your website is online!
WordPress is organized around posts and pages.
There are two types of content that are created by WordPress–posts and pages. The easiest way to explain the difference is that posts are part of an ongoing blog while pages are pretty much anything else.
When you type a domain name into your browser, you are taken to the “home” page or main blog page of the website. If it is a page, it could contain any type of content and look anyway the designer wants. If it is the main blog page, it will contain all or part of a recent blog or blogs and links that will enable readers to read the entire blog. Most websites with the exception of those that are strictly blogger websites will use a home page.
Posts are the content of blogs. If you click the blog menu at the top of this page, you will be taken to the main blog page for this site. You will see excerpts from some recent blogs followed by a button that will take you to the entire article. These articles are posts. What you are reading now is a post. Each time I create an article, I type the article as a post and it is automatically added to the main blog page along with information like the date published, category, etc. Posts are linked to this main blog page while user created pages stand alone. As you can see, this site, like many, is a combination of pages and posts. Several of my sites and many WordPress sites are made up of pages only since they have no blog posts as content.
The process of building a website starts with Internet hosting
Before you can start building a WordPress site you must first get a web host that is connected full time to the internet and hosts WordPress on its sites. Hosting is competitive and fortunately because of that there are thousands out there that are inexpensive and most web hosts have WordPress installed. For a few dollars a month, you can get web hosting that will host multiple sites, register domains, host email, and much more. The web host will keep your website, once published, online 24 hours a day, seven day a week. It will handle the installation of WordPress and keep it updated. If you get an account that allows for hosting multiple sites, you will only need one hosting account even if you have several websites. For example my hosting plan hosts this website; my math site, mymatheducation.com; and currently six others all on one plan. By purchasing the plan for three years, I pay about $7 per month for hosting and this is the most expensive part of the process!
If you are are interested in getting started, I invite you to visit the hosting site that I use for this and all my websites, to get great hosting that is easy to set up and use. [Disclosure: I am an affiliate of this host and will receive a commission (at no cost to you) that will help support this website if you buy through one of my links.] To read more click here or to get started click the link below.
Your domain name is your online identity.
Once you select a host, you must also obtain a domain name for you website. The domain name is how your website is located on the Internet. For example, this site is identified and located by the domain educationtech21.com. Fortunately most of your hosts will be able to find and register a domain name for you and the cost of the first year may be included in your initial hosting. Your hosting company will manage your domain for you and can keep it “parked” until you are ready to connect it to an active website. The hosting company that I use includes the first year cost of registration of one domain name with the cost of hosting. Look for names that are easy for people to remember but understand that many short names are already taken and it may take a little bit of searching to find a good one. Again, your host will have a search box that you can enter names into and check for availability. In general stick with .com names as they are best known. Although there aren’t any rules about names that end with .net or .org for example, there are conventions that often used. Also, avoid using a dash (-) in the name. It is confusing to users. Chose a name that is all together even if it is long. When a name you like is not available, consider adding a popular prefix in front of the name or suffix after the name (without the + sign) and see if that name is available. Some popular prefixes and suffixes are: my+ (the most popular), +online, the+, +web, +media, web+, +world, +net, go+, and hundreds more.
After setting up hosting and acquiring your domain, you are ready to install WordPress.
When you have completed the process of setting up hosting and acquiring your domain, the next step is to get WordPress installed and associated with your domain. With most hosts, this is as simple is clicking a button, specifying the domain that is will be installed on, and waiting a minute or so for it to happen! Once completed, you will gain access to WordPress and all of its functions on your site. You are ready to pick a theme, add a couple of plugins, and start building your site!
Install a theme and get that page builder plugin!
If you are just starting, just pick one of the popular themes and install it. The most popular theme for bloggers at the time I’m writing this is called Astra, but another popular one and the one that I use is OceanWP. I have used this theme on every website that I have created and find it flexible enough for everything I have wanted to do. The free version is enough for anyone beginning to use WordPress as well as most of the advanced features most people will need.
My advice to someone just starting with WordPress as well as experienced web creators is not to build your website with the WordPress built-in editor. Install Elementor and use it to create your entire site. Elementor is simple to use, intuitive, and drag and drop. There are even Elementor addons that add headers, footers, menus, etc. to your site. It is one of the most used plugins for WordPress and is known for its ease of use and powerful features.
Build that website!
When the theme and plugins are installed, it is time to build the website. While that is beyond the scope of this article, I have watched online videos that did the whole process including creating a nice looking, basic website in a couple of hours! Start by creating your home page as well as the headers and footers for all pages. Headers are simply the piece that goes at the top of each page and the footer is the piece that goes at the bottom. The header contains things like the site title, logos, main menus, and perhaps social media links. The header for this page is the part at the top with the brown background. The footer is the same thing at the bottom of each page. On this site it contains links to some terms of service, privacy policy, affiliate disclosure, and contact information as well as the copyright notice. Creating the home page first will help create the “look” for your site and many other pages may just be duplicates of the home page with different names and content.
While all these steps may seem daunting to a beginner, they really are not! It is actually easier than it sounds and I have seen people with minimal computer skills and no programming experience at all create a nice website with minimal effort. If you’re not afraid of the challenge and would like the flexibility of organizing your content on your own website, give it a try. The costs in time and money will be minimal and you might even find that it will be fun as well!
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