A complete beginner’s guide: How to setup a WordPress website for your business, blog or portfolio!
Written by a professional web developer, this guide is perfect for anyone looking to create a blog, small business website, or e-commerce site. Get started today and bring your online presence to life!
The 3 Simple Steps to Fabricating Your Ideas
Step 1 – Choose your platform
Like building a house, a good website needs a solid foundation, there are a few to choose from, so let’s pick which is best for you.
Get Started
Step 2 – Your domain & hosting
We need to pick & secure your perfect domain and find somewhere to host your new website.
Get a domain
Step 3 – Set up & making it your own
We have a solid foundation, so let’s start building the blocks that will shape ideas into a reality.
Customise your website
Step 1 of How to setup a WordPress website: Let’s choose your foundations
Spoiler: It’s definitely going to be WordPress! Like building a house, a good website needs a solid foundation, there are a few to choose from, so let’s pick which is best for you.
What options do you have?
Over the years, there’s been a number of innovative solutions that have been developed that makes making a website much easier and accessible to all.
It used to be the case that websites where built with static HTML (the code that forms the blocks and text), CSS (the code that styles everything and adds colours and sizes) and as years went on: Javascript (code that adds additional functionality such something happening when you click on an item).
Nowadays, we have tools that have been developed specifically to open website development to a much wider market and have taken the entry requirements right down to basic levels, these are called content management systems (CMS).
There are a few large-scale CMS’ that exist and you have probably already heard of them. The main content management systems are:
WordPress
If you are wondering how to setup a WordPress website, WordPress is the easiest & most popular way to create your own website or blog, using fully open-source software. As it stands, WordPress powers over 43.3% of all the websites on the Internet.
Drupal
Drupal is the next most popular way to create your own website or blog. Drupal is an open-source community driven program that offers huge flexibility but has a much steeper learning curve than WordPress.
Wix
Wix is a super intuitive and easy to use cloud based solution thats offers the ability to get a website live in minutes. Whilst easy, it often lack the flexibility & customisation users require and website can be slow and bulky.
Squarespace
Similarly to Wix, Squarespace is a quick solution to a problem and offers users an easy to get a site live for their customers.
Why do I love WordPress?
WordPress has come such a long way since it was created in 2003, it started out as a rickety old system that no one really knew how to use, but over the last 20 years or so it’s matured into a near perfect system.
And so if you are wondering how to setup a WordPress website, there are a number of reasons why we will choose WordPress and why we would recommend you to pick it up over other website builder companies that exist.
It’s FREE!
WordPress is completely free! That’s what makes it the ideal starting point for a website, there’s very little entry requirements and no upfront cost to get started. It’s completely open-source meaning there’s no subscriptions, no account creation and no free trials. You simply download it, install it and away you go!
There’s a wealth of free addons!
When using WordPress, there’s also thousands of free plugins (these add extra functionality and there is a plugin for just about anything from share buttons to newsletter software and full e-commerce software). There’s also a huge free selection of user created themes that you can use on your site to get started straight away!
There’s a guide for just about anything
As I mentioned before, WordPress is used by nearly half of all websites across the internet. With so many using the platform almost every question you can think of and almost everything you want your website to do has been done, and all the answers have been shared! This is great for beginners wondering how to setup a WordPress website and they aren’t sure where to start.
SEO (What’s that?) Friendliness!
WordPress is super SEO friendly right out of the box, and theres some great plugins to make it more so! SEO is what helps your site get noticed by others and the more friendly it is, the higher it will rank on Google & other search engines!
Security
Security is always a risk when you create a website and as a company you may be liable. WordPress is super secure and comes with essential security right from the get go. WordPress has already handled users logging in and theres great ways to extend this to a secure e-commerce platform.
