A Guide to DIY Wordpress Construction

Why Wordpress is a good choice and how to build it yourself.

This guide is designed to give you a stepped guide to putting together a basic Wordpress site. It assumes you have no prior Wordpress skills.

Why Wordpress
A Process to Follow
Useful Resources & Links

The home page of this website, we hope, clearly explains what we do and offer - and it should be apparent that we are not creative website developers. We can put you in touch with affordable website developers and you would probably be looking at a minimum cost of around R6,000 but there is no real reason to not think of building the site yourself. Once you own a site you would probably be updating content yourself so this process would at least give you the basic skills for those tasks.

We provide the hosting environment, fix things when they break and help with the search engine optimisation and the many technical issues that developers/owners can have when adding new functionality to their websites. We fit between the owner/developer and the web hosting farm bridging that gap between the two.

WHY WORDPRESS ?

The menu items above:
- Services > Website Hosting
- Services > Specialiseded Wordpress Hosting
much describe why Wordpress is a good choice as a development platform

But as usual this takes more time than planned and you were wanting to get moving on your project. So this is the gist of what we would be explaining here.

The Wordpress software may seem a little daunting at first but that is really because it is so versatile and you can do so much with it. So there are many avenues to navigate to get to where you need to be.

Wordpress started off life as blogging software. Really super easy software you can throw into webhosting space and start documenting your holiday or your life and your readers could comment as they wanted below - very, very similar to what became the early social media models such as FaceBook. But as it got more popular people realised they could use this to create websites and that simple usability, combined with the fact it was free and supported by a volunteer developer community, led to very quich growth and adaptability. As soon as someone wanted a special feature, such as a signup page for collecting email addresses for a newsletter, they got someone to write it for them and made it available as a plugin that you download for free and simply use. So over time Wordpress evolved from simple blogging software into an extremely capable CMS - a content management system.

A PROCESS TO FOLLOW

Anyone with basic design skills and computer confidence can put together a reasonable Wordpress website by following a process.

This can be as simple as :.....

Arrange website hosting space, preferably with a Wordpress friendly hosting provider.
The hosting provider (us?) would "install" a basic Wordpress ready for you to use.
- this may be in a stageing (temporay) domain if you are building alongside an existing website occupying your main domain.
You access that domain, choose your language and passwords, and the Wordpress is created ready to go. If fact, it is a complete working website known as a "naked install". You now just need to install the clothes and the extra bits and pieces.
But, for many, this could be a bridge too far. The Wordpress naked install would have provided a very basic site using a current stock Wordpress "theme" which will not be artistically all that great and definitely without any "Wow" factor.
There is an immediate solution to this in that you can now switch your attention to acquiring a "Wordpress Template" to address the issues of finding something pre-built in terms of the look and feel as well as the functions you may be needing. And this will bring us into the subject of selecting an editor as well.
The basic editor built into Wordpress is just that - pretty basic and - while powerful - perhaps not that easy to use. They have recently added Gutenberg Blocks as the main editor and there is a good argument that one should try to master its clumsiness in exchange for a no-nonsense and very reliable editor. But if you speak with ten Wordpress developers you may find that they all have a favourite editor with very few concurring. Perhaps Astra, Kadence, Divi and Elementor may be mentioned more that once and they would all have a set of editors they would recommend you avoid. Although this subject is slighty overshadowed by the selection of a template - it is an issue you need to be aware of. Perhaps the modus is to know what editors to avoid and how to check the reputation of the one you may go with. Our experience in helping clients who have lost contact with their developer is that mastering their unfamiliar editor is often the biggest challenge of the job.
So what is a Wordpress Template as opposed to a Wordpress Theme
See : https://www.wpbeginner.com/glossary/template/

See : https://www.wpbeginner.com/glossary/theme/
At this point, you need to get a good understanding about how Wordpress works and how to start assembling a site. Bear in mind, during this reading, that there are templates (some free and some at cost) that will provide you with a website that may be close to what you want and will save a lot of time in the long term.
If you visit the more popular Theme Editor sites (Kadence, Astra, Divi and Elementor) you will find that they all have a number of free website templates available - and one of those may just fit the look and functions that you need. That's something of a first prize as you get pretty much the website you want along with a top end and popular editor.

USEFUL LINKS & RESOURCES

WP Beginner - Guides

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