You have a life and life has a moment. Sometimes you want to keep your life secret and sometimes you want to share it with the world. This is where wordpress comes to the rescue by exhibiting your life's cherished moments to the world.
Wordpress is a Content Management System which, in its initial days, was commonly used for Blogging. However, with the advancement in the web technology, went on to become full fledged web development program. Now, it can be used to make websites of different genres like, static, e-commerce, dynamic, blog, etc. It has provided so much flexibility in its system that even a person who doesn't know coding can make a complete functional website. The documentation that it provides is so rich in knowledge that even a layman can understand and execute it. From single blogger to entrepreneur to small business to large enterprise, it caters to every everyone and fulfilling every demand. Such is the flexibility and power of wordpress. And the best part is, it is absolutely free to use!
It is basically works on modular system; it means that you don't have to build the website in the linear way. You can simply create chunks of content here & there and then insert them into the right place. So, what is the right place?
Well, wordpress doesn't work in solitary, it needs acquaintances to make it work properly. Those acquaintances are Themes, Plugins, Page Builders, Widgets, APIs and others. Thus combining all these together at the right place makes the wordpress a complete family. A family which, when work together in harmony, creates wonderful website.
Ok, so how do we get started and how to get the wordpress family together to make a fully functional website. Well, this needs an elaborate discussion, so let's discuss it.
Getting Wordpress
To get wordpress, you need three things: a computer, a browser and internet connection. Once you have all these things ready, you are good to go.
Choosing and Buying Domain Name
The first thing that you have to do is to choose the name of the business. Remember that the name should clearly define your business because once whole process is done, you don't have the choice to revert back to change the name. So make your decision wisely. Once satisfied with it, you need to host the site somewhere.
Choosing Web Hosting
There are many web hosting sites to choose from; some are free and some are paid. However, be careful in choosing one. You have to make sure that it supports wordpress eco-system else your whole exercise of doing it will go into vain.
Install Wordpress
Once you have your hosting site up & running, install wordpress from its official website. While installing, make sure that it is the latest version. The latest versions not only runs your site smoothly and seamlessly but it also comes with latest security enhancements which is vital to protect the site from any malicious threat.
Once installed, go to the control panel, which is popularly known as cPanel, of the hosting site and adjust the settings as per the requirement. After installing, you can go to the dashboard which has all the functions hanging out there giving you the complete control over the website development.
Dashboard
When you login to your website as an admin, the first window that shows up is called as dashboard. It is from here that you build, manage, manipulate and control your website. On the left side there is a menu structure which has all the standard options and it comes pre-installed with wordpress. So, now let's discuss the menu independently.
Themes
Theme is the look & feel of the website i.e. it is the design part which is visible to the end user. Themes display how the content is displayed on the webpage. The best thing that wordpress offers is the ability to change the theme without any hassle. Adding feather to the cap, it comes with loads of free themes to chose from. And if you are not satisfied with free themes then you can opt for premium themes. The themes range from static, dynamic, e-commerce, blogging, to many more; you name it, wordpress has it. Not only the themes are free, they are highly customizable to cater your needs. This means that you can change the look & feel of the theme as per the client's demand. To get the theme, all you have to do is to select the theme of your choice from the theme panel and then install & activate it, that 's it!
Plugins
Plugins are the functionality or the 'must-have' extra feature to make your site run smoothly & safely, adapt to the design etc. For example, you can have e-commerce plugin which gives your site trading platform. Similarly, there are hosts of plugins which serve different purpose for different users. Most of the plugins are free as well as paid. For an average user, most of the free plugins are more than enough to fulfill the needs. For advance users or for highly complicated website, paid plugins come in handy.
Widgets
Widgets are small modules which come with drag-and-drop feature. It has both: basic and extra feature. When you install a theme then few basic widgets come pre-installed and pre-placed at some important locations on the site like footer, header and side navigation. You can place the widget at any part of the website as per the web design. However, not all the themes have every kind of widgets, you need to check the documentation before installing any theme.
Content
Once your theme, plugin and widget is set, you can start adding content to your website. The three basic types of contents are: posts, pages and media.
Post: This is what makes the blog on your site. When writing a blog, you have to almost daily write the content which is known as post. The latest post gets the top place followed by the second post and so on. It is a timely blog post and has a publish date.
Page: It has the static content which doesn't come with the time stamp. The page have their own URLs like About Us, Contact Us etc.
Media: This is where picture, videos, animations and other media forms are uploaded. You can bulk upload the media directly from here or if you add media from the post or page still, the media gets stored in this section.
Lastly, the best thing about wordpress is that it is SEO friendly which means you have to make little effort to push it towards the boundary. The more parameter you fulfill, the better your website rank in the search results.
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