If you work from home or are trying to land that elusive first project, creating a professional website is an important step. As the headquarters 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 can be sold to their existing customers.

You don’t need to spend a fortune to develop 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 streamlines and simplifies the web development process, and as you’ll discover, it can still be flexible enough for just about any website imaginable.

What does WordPress do besides blogging?

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

Today, WordPress has become what would be called 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 way. 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 the content on your website
• 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 was launched, this advanced functionality has been used 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 as a result, it’s less time consuming. 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 speeds up your website setup is to try it out for yourself. WordPress is easy to install on your web host, or if you sign up to the WordPress website, you can explore its features out of the box.

Install WordPress the easy way

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

If you’re just trying out WordPress and don’t have your own web hosting, 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 PHP and MySQL compatible web hosting plan, 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 install 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 in just a few clicks.

find a great theme

Once WordPress is up and running, you’ll need to log in with the details you chose during setup, usually at yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will 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 from the Appearance menu.

Using the ‘Install Themes’ tab at the top of your screen, you can browse an extensive database of layouts and designs for your website. From conventional business designs to distinctive and unusual looks, there are currently 1607 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 dashboard, many websites offer a large selection of themes, some of which are free and some of which are ‘premium’ themes that incur a charge. If you are just starting out 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 the theme developers.

For professional WordPress themes, check out these websites:

• ThemeForest
• WooThemes
• Get your themes

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

Use of widgets

Many people choose WordPress because there are so 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 design 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. To 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 roadblock for people new to WordPress is the distinction between two similar types of content: pages and posts. Whenever you want to post something to 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:

• An individual 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 imagine you have a blog section on your website, in 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 at yourdomain.com/blog, giving your visitors the opportunity to view all of your most recent 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 don’t have a date attached to them. These are the pages on your website that are stand-alone and provide general information about your business.

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

Explore and learn on the go

You now understand WordPress concepts, including what it 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 deleted or edited, so the best advice is to check the menu options included in your control panel and start working on your content right now.

Once you’ve 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.