For startups and small business owners, you can save a fair amount of money and time if you know how to develop a business website yourself. 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 important piece of these puzzles is to learn how to build a website on top CMS platforms like WordPress and how to handle the entire project on your own. In this article, we will discuss WordPress web development in detail, step-by-step.

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 which will help meet your site’s needed functionality.
• Start building your pages.

Let us dig into each in more detail.

Choosing a domain name and hosting service

Picking a name is a challenging job; however, it is very important for the acceptance and popularity of your portal later. You can enjoy absolute freedom in choosing a domain name for your website, but it is not easy to get the exact name that you prefer the most. There are about two billion websites out there, so staying true to your business name could be so challenging.

However, it is always ideal for making a website name that is similar to the actual 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 booked the same, 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 too. Butdo not just go by the price but look for the providers’ support services and reliability to identify one match to 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 on settling on a hosting service, you can install WordPress and complete the wizard to make it ready to go with your web building project. You may log into the user panel of WordPress by using the access credentials. On the WordPress interface, you can find the following fields.

1. Welcome message – The most important fields of the admin panel will be listed with shortcuts here.
2. Current status of your website and what all development is happening in it.
3. Posts – You can make and access your blog posts here.
4. Media – To upload images, videos, and other media files to your portal.
5. Pages – You can create web site pages here.
6. Comments – You can access and moderate your blog comments through this panel.
7. Appearance – You can easily customize the design and layout of your website here.
8. Plugins – Explore and install WP plugins for various functions here.
9. Users – Go to this tab to manage the sub-user accounts that can access the website admin panel and set privileges.
10. Settings – All main settings are available here.

Some essentials to know in terms of setting up are as below.

• Set permalinks – Permalinks defines how different web page address is structured on the website. The optimized model of setting permalinks is adding the page title itself as the URL. Say, for example, the “about us” page can be named as 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, go to Settings and Reading and uncheck the radio button reading “Discourage search engines.”
• Set a website title and the tagline – To do this, you can access Settings and General, choose the Site Title fields and Taglines, and put in what you need. The title and tagline of your website will appear at different places on your web pages.
• Disable or allow comments – You have the choice to make the comments public or to keep it disabled. Enabling this is recommended if you want to build a supportive community around your website.
• Setting the time zone – Setting the most appropriate time zone matching to that of your business will make publishing the new posts and pages more predictable. However, if your target audience is at another geographical location, it is ideal to choose most of your audience’s time zone.

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 comewithout-the-box layouts and designs, which you can install instantly to achieve the look you need. You can also change them in the future to change the layout of your website without changing the actual content in it.

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 also offering themes like aThemes or ThemeIsle etc. You can also explore theme marketplaces like ThemeForest.

Add WordPress website pages

Once the theme is set, you can start building using the pick and drop development interface. First, put the headline of the page and then start working on the body. You get all the formatting options like text-align, colors, fonts, image uploads, and a lot more. You can try out any number of combinations to finalize the best. Most of the WordPress themes also offer images for you to display on the 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 are done with the page editing, click on the publish button. You can also start a blog as an extension of your website, which you can update from time to time with new content postings to engage your customers effectively. On the WordPress platform, you can go to Posts and then Add New to create a new blog and post it.

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 Experts tips with her readers.