Nowadays, it is easy to create a website without learning to code in any programming language. The arrival of content management systems (CMS) has changed the way of making websites. In those old days, a developer needs to code in HTML to create websites. As it requires coding and other technical skills, the common man cannot design and host a website himself. He needs to depend on an expert to design and host the website.
The content management system offers flexibility in designing different type of websites without any experts assistance. I designed and hosted my websites myself with the help of online tutorials and learned almost all by learning by doing. You can create the website yourself by following the step by step instructions.
Choose your domain name
The first thing to do to start a website is getting a domain name to identify your website on the internet. This is like giving a name to a person or a shop to identify it from the crowd. Your domain name is your company or shop’s identity on the web, make sure that it fits your topic, and also easy to remember and easy to pronounce. Keep it short, easy to type, related to the topic or subject, and memorable. Avoid numbers and hyphens and choose an appropriate name extension like .com, .net, .org or country-specific like .us, .in, etc. Try to get .com extension if it is available, 43% of domains on the net have .com extension and most familiar among netizens. If you have a domain registered with you, you can transfer it to the current web hosting provider.
Set up a Hosting Account
Next, decide the hosting package that you want to purchase to host your site. You don’t want to buy a top plan if you are an absolute beginner, start with a basic plan, you can upgrade the plan to premium without losing your data. If you are hosting your first website, get a basic plan, you can add some feature add-ons with your plan at the time of purchase or you can add it later. The domain privacy protection protects your personal information that you are giving for registering a domain. Your phone number, email address and contact address will be protected from the prying eyes. Search engine promotion and SSL certificate can be purchased later if you need it. If you are hosting a shopping website a secure connection to the website is essential, buying an SSL certificate is the right choice for shopping websites or other website receiving fund or money online.
Install WordPress
If you host your website in Bluehost, WordPress will be automatically installed for you by the WebHost. You need to click, Login to logging your website and need to choose a theme for your website. If you are using shared hosting or a VPS hosting, you need to install the WordPress by yourself. If the control panel offers Softaculous support, you can install WordPress using Softaculous. Softaculous is a script library that automates the installation of web applications to a website easily.
Choose WordPress theme and Plugins
You can choose the WordPress theme from Appearance from the WordPress dashboard as seen in the below picture. You can see the available themes, press activates to install and activate the theme. You can install plugins from the dashboard Plugins.
Learn to use the WordPress dashboard
Go through the WordPress dashboard to familiar with the interface. Click the dashboard to go back to the WordPress dashboard. Click, Posts, media, pages, comments to see the posts, pages, published pictures and comments on your website.
Customize and Optimize WordPress installation
You can customize your WordPress website by adding the right theme to your installation. If you need a shopping website look for a shopping theme. So you can build a web store without any difficulty. Do you want to sell something through your site, you can install Woocommerce or easy digital download plugins to set up a cart on your website. You can visit the WordPress website to find the best themes and plugins for your site based on the description and screenshots.
In WordPress, posts are meant to hold time-based content, the posts can be sorted into categories and tags. In Pages, you can write evergreen content or information where the publishing time isn’t very relevant like an About page or Contact page.
If you are hosting your website on Bluehost, they have an affordable WordPress hosting plan that automatically installs and updates WordPress. It also includes a free domain name for one year and free SSL certificate. Start a Bluehost WordPress hosting account to create and manage all your websites from one account panel.
