If you work from home or are trying to land that elusive first project, building a professional website is an important step. As the home of your business, your website can showcase your skills, provide details of your experience, and give potential customers a convenient way to get in touch.

Also, being able to create or work with a website is a useful skill in itself. For many people who work from home, the ability to get a website up and running is an additional service that they can sell to their existing clients.

You don’t need to spend a fortune developing a website for yourself. You can do it yourself, even if you have never had any experience. Fortunately, there is a secret: WordPress. WordPress is a free system that makes the web development process fast and simple, and as you’ll discover, it can still be flexible enough for almost any website imaginable.

What does WordPress do besides blog?

Many people have heard of WordPress, but do not understand all the capabilities of the system. Most people think of WordPress as a blogging platform when, in fact, it is much more than that.

Today, WordPress has evolved into what you would call a content management system, or CMS. A CMS is a tool to store all the information required for your website and present it to your visitors in a professional and organized manner. Other content management systems include Joomla and Drupal, but the reality is that WordPress is the easiest to understand, the easiest to use, and the most adaptable.

Let’s see, in simple terms, how exactly WordPress works once installed:

• Access a convenient WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface to work securely with all your website content
• You can create new web pages in a variety of formats
• The content you create is stored in a database.
• You can use the same interface to edit your content in the database
• When visitors access your website, the information from the database is presented to them in a website layout. You can change this layout at any time and your content will automatically take on the correct look

In technical terms, WordPress is quite advanced. In the nine years since the platform’s launch, this advanced functionality has been put to use in many exciting ways.

Why should you use WordPress?

You may be wondering why people choose WordPress as their CMS. The answer is because WordPress can make anything you want to do easier, faster, and more convenient!

The Reuters news agency uses WordPress to keep journalists up to date with the latest news as it happens. Music streaming service Spotify powers its entire website with WordPress.

WordPress makes it simple to create, edit, and organize your content and is less time consuming as a result. That gives you more time to focus on other areas of your business. WordPress also gives you the opportunity to get a professional design to make your website look great, often for free.

The best way to see how WordPress streamlines your website setup is to try it yourself. WordPress is easy to install on your web host, or by signing up to the WordPress website, you can explore its features with no configuration required.

Install WordPress easily

There are a few different ways to get started with WordPress, depending on your budget, experience, and whether you use a web hosting service.

If you’re just testing WordPress and don’t have your own web host, visit signup.wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. You will be guided through the entire process of creating your WordPress site, which will be stored on the WordPress servers for you. It is also possible to pay for a custom domain name (your website address) during the registration process.

Alternatively, if you already have a web hosting plan that supports PHP and MySQL, you can install your own WordPress on your server. This can be done by visiting WordPress.org and downloading the necessary files. The website also offers a convenient guide to installing WordPress in 5 minutes.

Finally, see if your web host offers an automatic script installer like Softaculous. If so, you will be able to log in from your web hosting control panel and install WordPress with just a few clicks.

Find a great topic

Once WordPress is up and running, you’ll need to log in using the details you chose during setup, usually at yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You’ll see the WordPress dashboard, a control panel that allows you to work with your website, and a variety of different menu items on the left-hand side. A good place to start is by selecting a theme, in the Appearance menu.

Using the ‘Install Themes’ tab at the top of your screen, you can explore an extensive database of designs and layouts for your website. From conventional business designs to distinctive and unusual looks, there are currently 1,607 themes available. After you find one you like, installing it is as easy as clicking the ‘Install Now’ button.

In addition to these free WordPress themes that are available from your control panel, many websites offer a large selection of themes, some of which are free and some of which are ‘premium’ themes that are chargeable. If you are just getting started with WordPress, a free theme is a good option. Of course, paying for a premium theme guarantees high quality, good performance, and ongoing support from theme developers.

For professional WordPress themes, check out these websites:

• ThemeForest
• WooThemes
• get your themes

Once you’ve installed your theme, you can conveniently customize it to meet your specific requirements. You can do this using Widgets.

widget usage

Many people choose WordPress because there are many professional looking themes available for it. However, it may be to modify the chosen useful theme to make it more individual.

When a developer creates a theme, they will name specific areas of the layout that you can customize. For example, you can change the menu at the top of your layout, a sidebar that runs down the side of each page, or the footer.

In the Appearance menu in your WordPress dashboard, select the Widgets option. On the right, you’ll see a list of the different areas of your theme that you can customize. On the left, there are a variety of included widgets that you can simply drag and drop into the appropriate section.

Standard WordPress widgets include links to other websites, an automatic listing of your pages, and a calendar of when posts have been published. You can also install other Widgets for free, in the form of plugins.

Use Widgets to customize your theme. Once you’re satisfied, it’s time to start thinking about the most important thing of all: your content.

Pages and posts

A common stumbling block for people who are new to WordPress is the distinction between two similar types of content: pages and posts. Whenever you want to publish something on your website, you need to decide whether it is a page or a post and select the appropriate option.

Originally, WordPress only offered the ability to create posts, a term that is short for blog posts. Posts are content items that are time-specific and, when created, have the current time and date attached to them. Creating a new post causes two things to happen:

• A single web page is created with the content of your publication.
• Your post is added to a single page that collects each individual post

This is perhaps clearer as an example: let’s say you have a blog section on your website, at yourdomain.com/blog. When you publish a new blog post, a single page will be created; for example this could be yourdomain.com/blog/my-post-name. But at the same time, your blog post will be added to the hub page in yourdomain.com/blog, giving your visitors the opportunity to see all your latest posts in one convenient place.

Posts are also added to your website’s RSS feed; more on that in our next article on advanced WordPress tips. Pages, on the other hand, are static elements that do not have a date attached to them. These are the pages of your website that stand alone and provide general information about your business.

If you’re still not sure, ask yourself this question before you create your content: Is this something standalone (a page) or something that is part of a section of the website that I will update regularly (a post)?

Explore and learn on the go

You now understand WordPress concepts, including what you can do, common terminology, and why you should use WordPress to build your site. So start exploring!

The good thing about WordPress is that it is intuitive and easy to use. Anything you create can be easily removed or edited, so the best advice is to check the menu options included in your dashboard and start working on your content now.

Once you’ve got started, be sure to read our next article on how to get the most out of your WordPress installation to create a website that really stands out from the crowd.