It astounds me just how many bad web pages I see every day. From pages which are badly coded and not fit for a mobile device to pages, which are straight out dangerous. For instance I recently came across a page, that had their logo linked to an executable file, which would get downloaded to your computer once clicked. I don’t even want to try and imagine what could lurk in that file. I assume the company, that deems itself a web design company, had best intentions in mind when they created that page. All the way back in 1999. Maybe they created a funny animated presentation of their services, who knows. I sure as hell don’t want to find out what lurks in that file. But in 2017 this sort of mistake is unthinkable. It’s an absolute no-go. So if you need a webpage, or you need a new webpage, because your old one is way out of date, you can make one for little to no money. I’ll explain.
WordPress is your friend
Let me repeat. WordPress. Is. Your. Friend! It is an open source solution, meaning it’s created by thousands of talented individuals from around the world and the company that stands behind it, Automattic. It is free to use for anyone. But what if I don’t have any design experience and on top of that am a noob online, I hear you ask. Let me assure you, even with no web design experience you can make an awesome looking and functional website. All you need is a little bit of time and effort. You can be done with it over the course of a weekend.
Here your journey begins.
Getting started with WordPress
Go to wordpress.com and create an account.
Just follow the on screen instructions. If you can read, you can do it. 😉
Pick and customise a Theme
The beauty of WordPress is the sheer amount of free designs or themes, as they are called. You can search the archives of WordPress by design features, single column, with a sidebar on the left side, a custom header and widget ready. Bam, there you go. Or you want a full-width, mobile-first, responsive, with focus on photography. Bam! There they are. All you need to do is pick one. Most of the themes are rather well documented, when it comes to customising them. And you can customise pretty much anything. So if you like a design and layout of a certain theme, but don’t like the colours, don’t worry, you can change those.
So go ahead and pick a theme you like most.
Now write some content and publish it.
Done.
Your site is live and looks awesome. With a bit more effort and the use of some nifty plugins you can transform your site into something even more amazing. But I will write about those more advanced features in future posts, so stay tuned.
If you have any questions about WordPress or anything related to it, hit me up on social (left above the menu) and I’ll do my very best to help you out.
Cheers!