A guide to your website designing
Why is it important for your business to have a website of its own? Well, let’s see it this way. One of the most basic reasons to have a website for your business is to increase business credibility. It makes the business more legitimate and trustworthy. There are so many similar businesses and products out there in the market. But, making prospective customers choose you over them is the main game. Having an attractive website will help you in creating a brand of your own. And, building a professional website is extremely crucial for a successful business.
And, we can go on and on with our explanation of the ‘pros’ of having a website. You can also read more on building your brand image and other website tools in our previous article of this series.
Moving ahead, as we promised, we are back with another easy website designing tool called WordPress. It is not just a website designing tool, here, you can build, modify and maintain your websites as well. One of the reasons it’s a popular choice is, that it’s free, relatively easy to use, customisable and flexible software. You will have the same notion once you get introduced to WordPress.So, let’s learn to create a quick and holistic website with WordPress.
In two parts and 5 simple steps, we will guide you in ( Part -1) how to launch your website and ( Part — 2) how to edit it to suit your needs.
Part-1. We have three simple steps in this process :
1. Choose a Domain name and Hosting
For people coming from non-technical backgrounds, Domain is the address of your website that people type in the URL bar to visit your website. It’s a unique name that identifies a website.
Hosting is basically a service provided to allocate space on a web server for your website to store its files, images, coding etc. In simple language, web hosting is the process of renting or buying space to house a website on the World Wide Web. While planning for a website, reliable web hosting is essential.
For more detailed insights on Domain names and Web hosting :
https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/what-is-web-hosting-definition/
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-hosting/
Now, that we know what a domain name is, we need to choose one for our business.
After choosing a Domain name, WordPress tells us if that particular name is available or not.
(Note: We can also purchase domains from multiple players and some of the notable ones are GoDaddy, Google etc). And if it is, it recommends similar or better choices for the same as shown. Right after we finalize our Domain name, it takes us to choose a plan for our chosen services. After making the payment we allotted our chosen Domain and we are redirected to another website called Bluehost.
2. Creating an account on Bluehost
We are directed to the Bluehost website where we have to fill in the account details and set a password. This successfully creates our account on the site.
Post that, we need to Login using the same credentials we created just now. Then, Bluehost asks if you need any help in navigating or building your website. You can directly skip it to go for our next step.
3. Install WordPress
As soon as you skip the question, it automatically goes to install WordPress. Right after installation, we can launch our website. But, before launching, we need to verify the email address we mentioned above.
After clicking on the ‘Verify me’ link. The notification pops up saying, ‘Successfully verified’. Post this, we need to again Login to WordPress to launch our site. And hurray! Your own website becomes live now!
We can verify by putting the website address on the URL bar. It loads up to open our website with our chosen Domain name. This website is now accessible to anyone in the world with the website address.
This is the way we launch our website. There is another set of steps to guide you to customize the website the way you want it to appear to the audience. This takes us to the second section of the article.
In the other two simple steps, we try to make this dull website a little more exciting and appealing to everyone. After all, if a website isn’t aesthetic and easy to use, who would want to be there in the first place? So without further ado, let’s get started.
1. Import a design to change the way your website looks
Now that we are on our actual website, we might tweak it a little to make it aesthetically pleasing. For that, we would need to import a theme. To do this, we go to our dashboard and from there we choose, ‘Appearances’ from the left-hand section. So, a ton of default themes pop up and we go ahead with ‘Add a theme’. This redirects to another page where we get hundreds of options to choose from. It has so many theme templates that you actually get confused.
Post picking one of them, we go ahead to install and activate it. After being activated, we need to choose a design for the page.
Click on ‘Get started’ which pops on top and it will direct you to a design-builder page. Here, we recommend you choose Elementor as it will help you edit your design. This then takes you to hundreds of actual website templates which can be used directly on the website.
Post selecting one, we can preview it to see how it might look actually on the site. Then, to make it go live, we need to import it by pressing ‘import’ at the bottom right corner and soon after, you receive a notification saying, importing successfully.
This template will now be seen as your website when people actually turn up to your site.
2. Edit the content
To edit the template to showcase your brand, you need to replace all the images, texts, and logos from the template. So for example you need to edit the homepage. You first go to the Hompage and then click on ‘edit with elementor’ situated right below the URL bar.
This then opens a subdivision on the left-hand side with all the edit buttons. From this, you can replace texts, images, anything and everything.
You can just double-click on the image to replace it with the image you want. Similarly, double-click on the text to edit and alter it. And, this way the entire look of the website changes.
This marks the end of our Part-2 process. Of course, there are other things you can always explore and add to refine your design further for example — adding more linked pages to your homepages, adding videos, testimonials etc. All these refinements make your website more personal and authorised.
We hope that you like our little introduction to WordPress and its functionality. For people who have a product-based business, you should wait for our next article focused on e-commerce marketing and branding. We have broken down the article into simple steps for you, to follow. Till then, keep reading and appreciating us by sharing it with your loved ones.
