WordPress Basics from Your NJ Web Development Team at Reclaim Digital
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free platform, initially developed to build blogs. These days it is used as a content management system for many websites. A large number of developers in NJ web development teams and around the world are using WordPress when building a website because of the perceived advantages of the platform. The advantages are, however, not always correctly understood. In this article, our experts in NJ web development present some significant advantages of using this popular platform to build websites.
- WordPress is Open Source: Many programmers share their code online, which results in the ability of the users to save development time and cost by using the existing code. WordPress has its entire code as open source, and that should be a significant reason for you to choose this platform for building your website.
- WordPress is Convenient: WordPress is developed for the majority of the markets, and hence, its administrator interface is convenient and friendly towards non-professionals or non-tech people. It is a simple system to operate, and website developers hardly need to invest any time understanding the system before they can start using it to build or edit their website. With some basic HTML knowledge, website developers can customize almost any task on the website with WordPress.
- WordPress provides fast construction: One of the advantages of building your website with WordPress is that it can be easily installed on the hosting servers. The website developers can start building the website within a short period.
- Pricing: WordPress development is a lot cheaper than if you want to develop a website using full-stack technologies like Nodejs or pure ASP. Also, there are many skilled website developers at Reclaim Digital that can help you build your website and make it live within no time.
- WordPress Plugins: Do you need video support? Do you need live chat? Do you need maps? WordPress comes with thousands and thousands of plugins that can do many jobs for you in just a click. The majority of these plugins are free to use and regularly updated by a community of highly trained professionals.
- WordPress is highly-customizable: This is another advantage that has led WordPress to become the most popular website building platform over the years. It can be used to develop any type of website imaginable. It has been noted that 15% of the top 100 websites in the world are being powered by WordPress. Major brands like MTV News, BBC America, TechCrunch, and Sony Music are all using WordPress. It’s incredibly flexible and highly customizable. Therefore, the website developers can use it to develop anything from a simple personal website and blogs to the more complex website of a Fortune 500 company or large-scale government projects.
How to make your website using WordPress
Is your business looking to get a website? It can be a terrifying thought when you finally decide on building a website. At Reclaim Digital in NJ, web development is considered crucial to a business and we invest a great deal of time testing products to ensure we provide excellent quality for our audience and clients. Most people these days are familiar with the workings of a website that is being powered by WordPress. With this article, we want to reach out to businesses who are creating their first website using WordPress. It is a platform that we strongly recommend.
Here are some of the topics we will cover in this guide for beginners:
- Choosing the correct content management system
- Finding and registering a domain name for free
- Choosing the right website hosting
- Installing WordPress
- Installing a template to change your site’s design
- Creating pages in WordPress
- Customizing WordPress with add-ons and extensions
In building a website, we’ll begin with choosing the correct content management system, finding a domain name, the best web hosting service, looking out for the perfect themes, adding plugins and using WordPress’s customizing options for your site’s appearance. As soon as you are finished with this beginner’s guide to making a WordPress website, you will have a complete website ready to go!
- Choosing the correct content management system
A content management system (CMS), in simple words, is a system or a platform of sorts which allows you to create your content, edit it, and publish it on a website.
There are a few very good CMSs available in the market in NJ for web development. But for someone who is creating their first website, Wordpress is an ideal solution. An overwhelming number of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. It is because it provides considerable scalability and works for websites that expect the low or medium amount of traffic.
Now that you have chosen the correct content management system for your website, you can continue to the next step.
2. Finding and registering a domain name for free
Before selecting a domain name for your website, experts in NJ web development feel it is important that you narrow down the niche you would like to target. This topic should be well researched, and it should be something that you are passionate about.
The most common domain name extensions in the market are .com, .org and .net, but within the last few years, various types of extensions have been introduced like .pizza, .ninja, etc., that are targeted for a specific type of audience.
Once you have the extension, you will need to concentrate on the domain name. There are a few things that we would recommend that you keep in mind while choosing the right name:
- The name should be short
- It should be brandable, as you want it to be memorable.
- It should be catchy while also describing what you do.
- It is easier to type for the audience.
- For better search engine optimization (SEO), you can include specific keywords.
3. Choosing the right website hosting
There are really only two options for beginners that we recommend when choosing the website hosting:
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- Shared Hosting
For a beginner, we managed WordPress hosting might be a bit costy, and the knowledge of other types of hosting is unnecessary at this point. We would recommend for the beginner to choose shared hosting, as you can always upgrade later on.
There are many web hosting providers on the internet, and you can choose which one fits your budget and provides you with all the necessary requirements under the package offered.
4. Setting up your newly created website
You will find a lot of stuff on your website hosting account dashboard (cPanel). For now, you can ignore most of them and look for the “Install Wordpress” icon and click on it. Next, choose the domain name for which you wish to install WordPress. Once you have entered the necessary details, click on the ‘Install’ button and Quick Install will install WordPress on your new website. Once the installation is completed, you will be taken to a WordPress login URL. Great! Now you have your first WordPress website!
Note that your login URL will look something like this: https://www.domainname.com/wp-admin
You can now enter the admin username and password that you provided during the installation phase and start setting up your website.
WordPress themes allow you to control the visual appearance of your new website. These themes have been designed by professionals, and you can install them on your website with a single click. The default theme is not very appealing, and this is why most of the people decide on picking out another theme.
You can check under Appearance >> Themes and find around 5000 themes from the WordPress directory. Install the theme that you find suitable enough for your website. You can also customize the theme while having a live preview of your website.
The next step to consider is to add content to your website. Wordpress provides default pages and posts content types. In pages, you can have static content such as “about page,” “services page,” etc. On the other hand, posts are sort of a blog, and by default, they show up in reverse chronological order. After this, you would want to enter a few blog posts. Wordpress has a simple interface for writing blog posts that help you to edit the content, add photos, organize categories of blogs, etc. You can always click save while editing and return to editing the post at a later time.
Now, you would like to put all your content in a presentable manner. WordPress provides you many options to customize and tweak your website. You can easily change website title and tagline, add a comment section, create navigation menus, etc. You can follow a detailed guide on how to customize your website using WordPress.
As stated earlier, WordPress provides you with many plugins that can help you achieve complex tasks quickly. They help you to add features to your website like photo galleries, contact form, etc.
How can Reclaim Digital help?
If the entire process of building a website seems a daunting task or you do not have the time to develop a website, we are happy to be at your assistance. At Reclaim Digital, we provide individuals and businesses in NJ with web development! No matter what the answers, our design and development team can help you build a site that will help you achieve all your goals.
