6 reasons why you will love this great WordPress website setup guide:
- Beginner-friendly: This guide is very detailed, comprehensive and easy to follow, even if you are not a technician.
- Up to date: This guide is updated every week to keep up with the latest web design trends.
- Quick setup: In one hour, your website will be up and running, responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Platform: Your website will be built on the right platform and in the right way.
- Guaranteed results: We guarantee that by the end of this guide you will have a website
- Free support: We are open to questions. Leave a comment below with your question and we will be happy to help.
At Publi Web Média we spend a lot of time reviewing products and providing quality content to our readers and to our clients’ readers. Many of them are familiar with how a website built with WordPress works. This guide is meant to help anyone building their first website with WordPress. It is also the platform we recommend and use for our own website.
We will start by helping you find the best content management system for your needs, the best domain name and the best web hosting service. We will add the best plugins and the best theme, whose look we will customize to meet your aspirations. By the time you finish working through this guide on how to make a WordPress site for beginners, you will have a full-fledged site ready to launch!
What is a content management system?
A content management system (CMS), in simple terms, is a platform made of all sorts of options or a mechanism that lets you create your content and publish it on a website. Let’s say it is a hanger and your content is the garment.
It is software that is installed on a web server. A web hosting provider such as www.hosttango.com already offers a one-click installation process for an instance of the WordPress CMS. Once installed, you will be able to log in to your site as an administrator and start adding photos, text and other content. You can use the content you want to add and present it as a blog, or in other content forms such as a product page, or even display a portfolio of your work on your site.
Once the chosen theme is installed, you can modify it according to your target niche and to meet your site’s characteristics. You can also enrich it with plugins to add features. For example, a social sharing plugin to spread your site’s texts through social networks.
All of this and more can be accomplished with a content management system.
Which CMS is best for you?
An overwhelming majority of websites use WordPress. The two other options trailing far behind WordPress (certainly in popularity) are Joomla and Drupal.
WordPress
The ideal option for someone building their first website. It has considerable scalability and works perfectly for low-traffic sites with average traffic (less than 1 million page views per month. That gives you an idea of what average traffic is, if you were wondering). Even large sites such as TIME Magazine, CNN, TED, Tech Crunch, NBC and many others use WordPress and they get millions of page views every day.
There are a great many points that can be made in favor of using WordPress:
- Easy to install: Most hosting services have a one-click install option for WordPress, given the number of people who use it.
- Strong community and open source: It is free and used by a great many people. There is a plethora of free themes and plugins you can use for your site.
- Premium themes and plugins are inexpensive and include excellent support services from their vendors. If you have a doubt, or a problem, a simple Google search will answer your query. We would go so far as to say that you will find the answer to your questions in the first three results of a Google search. A strong community will help you in your WordPress onboarding if you run into a problem. And you can always leave your comments here and rest assured that we will answer at the first opportunity.
- Ideal for site creators who are laypeople: Most WordPress-related products, such as themes and plugins, are quite simple and intuitive to use. Installing a content management system (CMS) like WordPress is only the first step in the process of creating a website. But since WordPress is easy to install and configure, the tools you will need to build out your whole site are easy to handle.
Two not-so-favorable things about WordPress:
- One drawback of WordPress is that it can become hard to handle if your site grows far too large and receives a huge volume of daily traffic. The cost of your hosting goes up. But we are talking about traffic in the millions here, and it is not something you should worry about for now.
- Another potential problem is the quality of free plugins and themes. While most are good and have fairly high security standards, you should be wary of plugins from unknown third parties. WordPress is a secure platform “out of the box,” but adding third-party software while showing poor judgment is a bad idea. That said, security flaws are generally fixed as soon as they are detected.
As you can see, WordPress is by far the most popular content management system and is used by 65% of CMS websites worldwide.
The thing you need to know is that every CMS has one drawback or another. And for a new web administrator, WordPress is the best CMS.
We will now talk about Drupal and Joomla.
Drupal
Unlike WordPress, Drupal is not very well suited to beginners – although since the introduction of the “Adminimal” administration theme, it is quite different. (see our article: How to improve the usability of the content manager in Drupal?) . Drupal is an open source CMS that is widely used by large companies that have vast sites and high traffic. It has its own customization possibilities with themes and plugins created to add value to sites. Sites using Drupal are a little faster and a little lighter on the host’s server resources.
But if you are new to web development, Drupal is not a good choice for you. Why? It is more complicated than it needs to be to meet the requirements of a showcase site. It is designed for complex, vast, high-traffic sites that your new site will not have to start with. Given that, there is no need to add unnecessarily to the difficulty of the site-building process. And besides, you can always switch to Drupal at a later date.
Joomla
Open source and free like the two previous platforms. It is a bit better than the other two when it comes to building a community of users (like a small social network or a tight-knit community of readers) and is much more favorable to building social sites with a lot of user interaction and engagement. It is easier to handle than Drupal and offers more than WordPress in terms of performance and tweakability.
WordPress – probably the best option for you!
If you are starting with a new domain name with no traffic, you are better off with WordPress. It is extremely easy to use, it is free and comes with a very large number of high-quality free themes and plugins. The cost of hosting is low and many hosts offer one-click WordPress installation. And since a growing percentage of online developers don’t know how to code in HTML, CSS and PHP, WordPress is the best choice, because it offers excellent customization even for beginners.
To sum up why WordPress is the best choice:
- Free – who would object?
- Strong community – someone to answer your questions, if they haven’t already been answered on the hundreds of WordPress forums.
- Frequently updated platform – Updates are important (fixing bugs, security, constantly improving features and performance and ensuring compatibility with all WordPress products).
- A multitude of free themes and plugins – helps keep costs low.
- Excellent options for premium plugins and themes – The little extra at a reasonable price.
- Easy to use and beginner-friendly – designed for you and not for programmers.
- Secure platform (out of the box) – important for sites that generate revenue.
- Adaptable for average traffic.
- Several hosting options, including managed hosting services – You focus on the content, your host takes care of everything else.
- A wide range of choices for running site backups – Site backups are extremely important for average-traffic sites, ensuring minimal downtime if your site were to be hacked.
Finally, do not confuse WordPress.org with WordPress.com, which is a blogging site built with WordPress.
