Table of Contents
Startups and small business owners can save a fair amount of money and time if they know how to develop a business website. The traditional practice of business application development is hiring web developers and designers, which is a sizable investment of time and money. With self-development options available, you can stay ahead of the competition by effectively incorporating your goals and visions into the web apps you develop. However, the most critical part of these puzzles is learning to build a website on top CMS platforms like WordPress and handle the entire project independently. In this article, we will discuss WordPress web development in detail.
Snapshot of WordPress web development
In an instant, let us have a quick overview of WordPress development essentials as below:
- Find the most appropriate domain name for your business website.
- Choose a cost-effective web hosting service.
- Install WordPress through the hosting interface.
- Pick out an appropriate theme from thousands of free WP themes.
- Identify the essential WordPress plugins to help meet the functionality needed for your site.
- Start building your pages.
Let us dig into each in more detail.
Choosing a domain name and hosting service
Picking a name is challenging; however, it is essential for the acceptance and popularity of your portal later. You can enjoy absolute freedom in choosing a domain name for your website, but getting the exact name you prefer most is challenging. About two billion websites exist, so staying true to your business name could be difficult.
However, it is always ideal to create a website name similar to an organizational name or a phrase associated with your niche. A good domain name must be simple, short, brandable, non-confusing, and easy to memorize.
Once the domain name is finalized and you have booked it, you can also look for a cost-effective and reliable hosting service to host your web pages. There are plenty of web hosting service providers, including many free services. Do not just go by the price; look for the providers’ support services and reliability to identify one that matches your overall budget and needs. For domain and hosting services, you can also seek the guidance of reliable technology consultants like FLOSUM.
Installing WordPress CMS
Once you settle on a hosting service, you can install WordPress and complete the wizard to prepare it for your web-building project. Using the access credentials, you may log into the WordPress user panel. The following fields are available on the WordPress interface.
- Welcome message – The most important fields of the admin panel will be listed with shortcuts here.
- What is the current status of your website, and what development is happening in it?
- Posts – You can make and access your blog posts here.
- Media – Upload images, videos, and other files to your portal.
- Pages – You can create website pages here.
- Comments – You can access and moderate your blog comments through this panel.
- Appearance – You can easily customize the design and layout of your website here.
- Plugins – Explore and install WP plugins for various functions here.
- Users – Go to this tab to manage the sub-user accounts that can access the website admin panel and set privileges.
- Settings – All main settings are available here.
Some essentials to know in terms of setting up are as below
- Set permalinks – Permalinks define how different web page addresses are structured. The optimized model of setting permalinks adds the page title as the URL. For example, the “about us” page can be named website.com/aboutus. A proper setup of permalinks will help you achieve this.
- Make your website public – You may want Google to find and index your site. To enable this, click Settings and Reading and uncheck the radio button reading “Discourage search engines.”
- Set a website title and tagline—You can access Settings and General, choose the Site Title and Taglines fields, and enter what you need. Your website’s title and tagline will appear on different pages.
- Disable or allow comments—You can make them public or keep them disabled. Enabling this is recommended to build a supportive community around your website.
- Setting the time zone—Choosing the most appropriate time zone that matches your business will make publishing new posts and pages more predictable. However, if your target audience is in another geographical location, choosing the time zone of most of your audience is ideal.
Pick an appropriate theme for your portal
The next important step in WordPress development is to pick an appropriate theme. This will decide how your WordPress site will look. WordPress themes come with out-of-the-box layouts and designs, which you can install instantly to achieve your desired look. You can also change them to change your website’s layout without changing its content.
There are free and premium themes out there on WordPress. You can also find the same on third-party websites like JustFreeThemes. There are independent stores that also offer themes like aThemes or ThemeIsle. You can also explore theme marketplaces like ThemeForest.
Add WordPress website pages
Once the theme is set, you can build using the pick-and-drop development interface. First, put the page’s headline on it and start working on the body. You get all the formatting options like text-align, colors, fonts, image uploads, and more. You can try out any number of combinations to finalize the best. Most WordPress themes also offer images to display in prominent spots alongside the web pages. The basic structure with the fundamental pages to be created is About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Portfolio, Store featuring products or services, etc.
Once you finish the page editing, click on the publish button. You can also start a blog as an extension of your website, which you can update occasionally with new content postings to engage your customers effectively. On the WordPress platform, you can go to Posts and then Add New to create and post a new blog.
Author Bio: Kelly Wilson is an experienced and skilled Business Consultant and Financial advisor in the USA. She helps clients, both personal and professional, in long-term wealth-building plans. During her spare time, she loves to write on FLOSUM. She loves to share her knowledge and Expert tips with her readers.