Many people get frustrated with the prospect of designing your own website when they see just how expensive software is, and how confusing it can be. Learning HTML is a tedious and mind boggling thing for many people, and the software that allows you to create HTML sites is super expensive. So what’s the alternative? Take the much simpler route and design a website for no money, without HTML, using WordPress.
WordPress is known as “open source” software. In short, it is free to use and simple to install on any domain you have. More importantly, it is very simple to USE to design your own website.
Please note: We are not talking about using “WordPress.com” to create a blog. Using the WordPress.org system to create a blog is great and all, but in the end, it is NOT your site. It is WordPress.com’s content! That means they can shut it down whenever they want. You don’t own it.
We are talking about using WordPress.org! This is a blog “tool”, or publishing platform and content management system that we will install on our own domain, from within our own hosting account.
How To Design Your Own Website Using WordPress In 5 Steps:
Step 1) Purchase a quality hosting account that allows for the free installation of WordPress from within the account. You can click for more information on how to host a website, and our recommendations for top hosting companies for 2020.
Step 2) Choose a Domain Name – The absolute simplest way to purchase a domain name is from directly within your hosting account under the “domain manager” tab. Otherwise, consider using NameCheap.com, GoDaddy.com, or any other domain name selling service.
Choosing a Domain Name for SEO: You may want to consider including a search term in your domain name that has to do with your website topic! So for instance, if you had a site that aims to sell baseball bats, you could call the site “buybaseballbats.com”. This can help you rank for the search term of “buy baseball bats”, plus the domain portrays exactly what the website is about!
Step 3) Install WordPress on the Domain Name – From within your hosting account, simply click the WordPress logo for simple “one-click-install” of the blog software.
Next you’ll be prompted to choose the domain name to install it on. Click “install” and voila! It’s done!
Step 4) Customize the Blog – The next thing you’ll want to do is jazz up the blog to look the way you want to. The appearance of the blog can be changed by adding different free “Themes”. There are thousands of free themes that are found from within the dashboard of your blog under “Appearance”.
The other way to customize the blog is through the use of “Plugins”. An analogy I like to use is Plugins are to a WordPress blog, as “apps” are to a smartphone. Plugins change the look and functionality of the blog when they are installed.
Some Essential Plugins: All In One SEO (an SEO plugin, helping with on page SEO), Google Analytics (helping with tracking stats of your site), Akismet (a spam blocker), and a Google XML Sitemap creator plugin (helping with Google indexing of the site).
Step 5) Add Content and Publish – Now that you have the blog set up and customized a little. The next thing is to add a “Post”, or a “Page” to it. Many people will argue the best practices of using posts or pages, but for a beginner, it is simple enough to just publish posts for your content. For the Contact Us page and Privacy Policy, you may want to consider using a “Page”.
After you write your content, simply click “Publish” and your blog is now visible to the world! You can further customize your blog in many various ways that are beyond the scope of this article.
The point is, installing the blogging tool, WordPress, on your domain name and creating a website with it is a very economical and easy way to create a great looking website in just minutes! I hope that quick tutorial helped you believe you can design your own website without the use of expensive HTML software. The most important step is to just get a reputable hosting plan, again you can check out our top hosting companies for 2020 page. Thanks for reading and good luck!
