No matter what niche you’re working in, you will need a high quality website to establish your online presence. There are a lot of options when it comes to building a site. You could create a site from scratch, use ready made templates, purchase a drag & drop website builder or hire a web designer for a custom solution.
However, choosing WordPress could be one of the smartest decisions you make. WordPress is a great tool you can use to build incredible websites. In comparison to other solutions it will save you both time and money. You should seriously consider using WordPress even if you already have a website.
What is WordPress?
In a nutshell WordPress is a flexible platform for building blogs and websites. Anyone can use WordPress to create high quality sites, without needing any technical knowledge of web programming languages.
Why Use WordPress?
1. It’s 100% Free to Use!
The WordPress software will cost you nothing. Simply download and install it on your server. You can then immediately start building your site.
2. Quick and Easy Installation.
WordPress is very user friendly and can take just 5 minutes to install. You will be adding content to your site in no time.
3. Powerful Content Management System.
Using the admin Dashboard you can add/edit/delete the content of your site, including images, audio and video.
4. Abundance of Themes.
There are thousands of themes available, both free and paid versions. Themes allow you to completely change your sites design and can be further customized.
5. Enable New Features with Plugins.
Easily add new functionality such as in built Google translate, search engine optimization (SEO), image galleries, contact forms, social networking features etc.
6. Supported by an Active Community.
With millions of users, any questions or problems you have won’t go unanswered. It is likely your questions have already been asked and answered. The WordPress forums and online manual are indispensable resources.
7. Keeps your site Safe and Secure.
With every new release of WordPress, the security of your site is improved. In addition there are many tools to help backup your website data, so you can easily restore your site if something ever does go wrong.
How Do I Get Started?
Good question. To start off, download the latest version of WordPress from WordPress.org. Then watch this video:
Customizing WordPress
After you have successfully installed WordPress on your server, you can change the default theme. Choose from the thousands of free and paid-for themes, find the theme that has a look and feel appropriate to your site. You can even edit a theme, if you are not completely happy with the existing ones. To apply a new theme, go to your WordPress Dashboard. Click appearance, then Themes. You can preview a theme before installing it.
You can customize your WordPress site further by using plugins. The one plugin you will want to use is Akismet. Comment spam is a big problem and without this plugin you would waste a lot of your time trying to separate the genuine comments from the spam.
One last tip. The default URLs for your WordPress blog posts and pages, are not optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Watch this video to learn how to change the permalink appearance, to fix this issue.
For more WordPress tutorial videos check out:
Erfan @ TheInfoMarket.co.uk
This is a guest post written by Erfan Shahedi, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.
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Hi John,
Just had my Sunday morning
Wordpress lesson regarding Permalinks.
This was something I had overlooked up until now.
As always John, quality no bs blog posts and help.
Thanks again
Regards
Jerry
Hi
Great post. This will come in handy for the newbie wanting to set up their own blog.
Many people have a fear of this technical stuff. But they shouldn’t, its about getting started.
Follow these basic instructions and you’ll be there very quickly.
James Hughes
Just curious– I know a lot of people like WordPress, and it sounds like it does have lots of bells and whistles available; but what do you think of Weebly? I have built my site there just recently, and liked working with this company– it was extremely user-friendly, and also is free to have up to two websites. They do allow you to put in keywords and descriptions for all the pages, to do SEO, and they have easy connection to a PayPal shopping cart.
Hi Diane.
Weebly is also a great platform for building your site, and has features comparable to WordPress.
WordPress does have the advantage of allowing unlimited websites for free. But the main reason to use it would be the massive amount of support in terms of the community, themes, plugins etc.
Hi John,
Agree that wordpress is a very flexible and user friendly platform.
The price …. free … makes it even more attractive.
Thanks for sharing
Cheers
Bryan
Hi John,
congratulations on a very informative post. I use WordPress a lot and generally speaking I’d have to say it’s a great way of getting our stuff on the net for free.
It just bugs me a bit that they still haven’t offered even a small selection of extra fonts and size capability without having to grab an additional plugin. It seems a fairly basic requirements really, and it just really surprises me that they haven’t gone down this track.
Could be there’s a really good reason for it, but I can’t imagine what it would be.
All the best buddy,
Paul
Hi Paul.
I think one reason WordPress hasn’t gone down that route is to keep the base installation fast and light. This prevents feature creep and having lots of options the vast majority of users won’t use, but is taking up space on their server.
In this way a new user won’t be overwhelmed with lots of options and can concentrate on the content of their site. Using plugins you add only the extra features that you are actually going to use.
Hi Erfan and John
A great post for anyone new to WordPress.
Nowadays, WordPress is so simple to install with many web hosts giving one click installation. You just can’t go wrong.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Erfan/John,
I started using WordPress about 7 months ago.
I’d never used it before and at the outset thought it was complicated – I didn’t even know what a plugin was or a theme!
After some experimenting and reading up I realised what a flexible platform it is.
I created my first ever blog, which has been ‘live’ since June, and I haven’t looked back.
For any newcomer reading this and wondering whether or not to take the plunge, just do it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
Regards,
Dean.
WordPress is an awesome platform for internet marketers who wish to get their content out there to the net for people to read, and also to make some money too.
With the search engine optimisation features, plugins, and social media activity you can get your wordpress blog buzzing within months if you know how.
You will have to do alot of trial and error though, and see what works. Remember what works for you, won’t work for others.
Matt Morgan
I starting my first website when wordpress was not popular then. It was i html format and every time I had to change something , it was so difficult and had to go through lots of work.
Then I stumbled upon some website easy templates for simple website creation and hosting . But they lacked flexibility .
When I discovered wp later in my web building and hosting journey , I got hooked to it as it is so simple to use , so flexible .
All my websites are created with WP now and of course with varieties of plugins to add value to them. Thanks to those plugins creators who make WP website so powerful .
Thanks John for sharing …
WordPress is a great platform for building websites. I have been building websites for small businesses for over a decade and now most of the sites we create use WordPress. There are so many themes and plugins that you can create just about anything with out writing any code.