wordpress webdesign

WordPress Webdesign: a step for beginners

Creating a WordPress Website is no longer a luxury at a time when WordPress is the most widely used open-source content management system (CMS) ever compared to other content management systems; there is no alternative to using it. More than 34% of websites work on it, and it is far followed by the second-ranked Joomla system, whose share does not exceed 2.8% of websites. WordPress currently supports 57 languages, including Arabic.

One of the main reasons for the popularity of WordPress is its ease of installation, even for beginners who do not have experience or good technical knowledge. In this guide, you will learn the first steps of how to create a WordPress site in a practical and simplified way.

Table of contents:

• Buying a WordPress website domain
• Booking hosting
• Installing WordPress
• Managing the WordPress dashboard and its functions

First: buying a WordPress website domain

Although WordPress is free and open source, this does not mean that creating your own site will be free and without any charge, because you will need to book hosting and purchase a domain for the site. In terms of buying a domain, there are a very large number of companies that sell domain names, and for reasonable amounts. Some hosting companies give a free domain name if you host your site on them.

It is preferable to choose a suitable domain name, that expresses the content of the site, and not being too long so that it is easy to memorize. In addition:

• Use words that express the activity of the site, if your site is about sports, the word Sport is a good word to include in the name, and the more specific the better.
• If your site includes local businesses, the name of the city or region can be included on the site.
• Avoid numbers (123sitename) and the small bar (name-site).
• Choose a distinctive name that is easy to remember, there are millions of sites now whose names may be similar, be sure to choose a distinctive name, you do not want the user to type the address of your competitor's site instead of you.
• Search carefully, and make sure that no one owns the domain name or has any rights to avoid problems.
• You don't need to build a site for each domain, you can transfer traffic from one domain to another as needed.

Now, let's say you want to create an online store whose domain name contains the word “sook”. Go to the main domain selling site (Godaddy), for example, and type in the search box the word you want the domain name of your site to consist of.

After clicking on the “Search " button the site will search for available domain names, in this case, the domain name sook.com is not available, but the site will suggest you some similar domain names, derived from the word you entered in the search box, and will attach their prices, as you can see in the image below.

Choose a domain name that suits your site and budget, and click the “Add to Cart” button. Then click on the “Continue to Card” button. You will have to create an account to complete the purchase.

There is another issue to pay attention to, which is the domain name suffix (.com,. net, or .org). in general, it is preferable to use the domain name suffix (. com), but there are many other suffixes used by site owners, and some of them have specific meanings, for example:

• net general
• org is specific to non-governmental organizations
• edu is specific to educational websites
• gov is specific to government websites
• mil is especially for military sites

Also, each subsequent country has its own domain, such as .ma representing Morocco,. sa representing Saudi Arabia, and .uk representing the UK .. Etc.

Second: booking WordPress hosting

When creating a WordPress site and after purchasing a domain name, you will have to book hosting for your site, there are many hosting companies specializing in WordPress. Some of them offer very tempting offers, sometimes they can reach less than three dollars a month. Hosting companies will give you space on their servers to host your new site and the domain name you have chosen.

There are dozens of options available for hosting your site, so you will have to look for what suits you from them, the following article will help you choose the most suitable hosting for your site: what is the most suitable web hosting for your startup Before that, you have to decide on your needs:

• What kind of website are you going to create An e-commerce website, a publishing website, a personal website, and others
• How many websites do you want to host One site or several sites
• Is there a perception of the size of the site If the site contains multiple media such as video and audio, you will need a large server space
• What will be the expected number of visits Mostly the price of the hosting service increases with increasing pressure on the server (server)

1. head to the main website of the hosting company, and choose the hosting plan that suits you.
2. the site will suggest you enter the domain name of your site, and it may be suggested to give you one for free.
3. after that, you will have to create an account and enter your personal information, and payment data.

Third: install WordPress

Some hosting sites take care of installing WordPress, and some scripts can automate the installation process, such as Fantastico, Softacular, and QuickInstall. WordPress can also be installed manually, but the easiest way to install WordPress is by hosting your site with a hosting provider that installs WordPress automatically.

Step one: Cpanel

Log in to the cPanel control panel of your hosting, the link to which I send to your e-mail.

Click on the icon “Install WordPress”, and you will be redirected to the Mojo Marketplace. It is a site that contains many popular web applications, such as WordPress, this site automates the installation process of those applications, as one click is enough to install them.

Step Two: Install WordPress on the hosting

Now you are on the Mojo Marketplace page, click on the “Install New Scripts” button.

Step three: choosing a domain name

You will be taken to another screen, and you will be asked to enter the domain name where you want to install WordPress. Enter the domain name, but before you click on the “check domain” button, you may see the “/” character followed by a small text box.

You need to choose the folder where you will install WordPress:

• If you leave the text box empty (this is recommended), WordPress will be installed in the root folder (root domain), for example, domain.com
• If you enter a word into the text box, for example, “WordPress”, WordPress will be installed in that folder, i.e.: domain.com/wordpress

After selecting the installation folder, click on the “check domain” button. You may get the message “it looks like files already exist in this location”, ignore it, and click the “Continue” button.

Step Four: Enter your WordPress login details

The installation process will take a few minutes. Once the installation process is complete, you will be directed to a page where you will find the registration data for WordPress:

You will get the following data:

• Your website address (URL)
• The address of the WordPress control panel (admin URL)
• User name (username)
• Password (password)

This information is very important, so you need to save it in a safe place. You will receive an email with all this information. If your site doesn't work right away don't worry, it may take a few hours to create the site, but your site will generally be ready in 12 hours.

This completes the creation of a WordPress site for you to use for your business project. Now you can log in to your site, and start publishing and sharing content with the world. As you can see, the steps are simple and uncomplicated. In the next part of this guide, we will learn how to manage the WordPress dashboard.

Manage the control panel after creating a WordPress site

The WordPress admin dashboard is the position from which you control the WordPress site. It enables you to create and manage site content, install plugins, switch themes, manage members, and many other tasks.

How to enter the control panel

If you use WordPress, the control panel will be your basic tool for managing your site. For this reason, it is important to understand this Palette, understand its capabilities, and how to use it. And first of all, you need to log in to your site, and type the address of your site followed by “/wp-admin”. For example, if the name of your site is:

https://yourdomain.com

You can access the control panel from the following address:

https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Enter your username and password, and WordPress will take you directly to the control panel.

When you first log in to the control panel, you will see the main screen, which contains some elements, such as the Activity section, quick draft, WordPress events and news, and a quick overview section. Add a welcome message at the top, with some educational links to learn more about WordPress. The main screen gives you a quick overview of all the details of the WordPress site.

The main screen is useful, it gives you a quick and general overview of the site, but its functionality is limited, so most of your time spent on the control panel will be spent on other screens. To access those screens or pages, you can use the menu options in the sidebar. This list is not static, items can be added to it, items can be deleted from it, and their order can be changed, so the list may be slightly different. But if you have just installed WordPress, you should see the following screen:

In the rest of the guide, we will talk about the pages and functions of the control panel. It includes a page of articles, media, pages, comments, and extensions by explaining their functions and how to use them to achieve your goals from creating a WordPress site and reaching what you aspire to

WordPress Website articles

This page is for articles or blog posts written on the site. It includes information about the posts, such as the name of the author, the ratings and tags of the post, the date of publication, and the number of comments on it. With the possibility of filtering them by dates or classifications. This page also allows you to delete, edit or view posts.

Since the site is new, there is only one post, which is “welcome to the world !”, A blog post that is automatically generated when installing WordPress. To create a new post from the “Articles” page in the Control Panel, click on the “add new” button located at the top of the screen, WordPress will take you to the edit articles Page.

Write the title of the post and its content, also note that there is a menu on the left with several options for the article, such as:

• Status and appearance: to determine the type of article, whether is it public and available to everyone, private, final or needs to be reviewed. And will it be installed on the main page of the site?
• Permanent link: article link.
• Categories: represent the categories or type of content of the article, for example, if the article is about pets, you may choose the categories, “cats " “ "dogs “and” pets"
• Tags: represent the elements and topics of the article, such as “ "photos of dogs", "cat food",” allergies from cats” …
• The leading image of the article: it is the main image that is displayed in the introduction of the article, which is optional.
• Snippet: represents a summary of the article, and is used for SEO purposes, so be sure to put your keywords in it.

Discussion: to determine whether to allow visitors to comment on that article or not.

After you have finished writing the article and selected its characteristics, click on the “Publish” button located at the top. You can also Manage labels and tags from the submenu that opens under the “Articles” tab.

Media control

The media library contains all the photos, graphics, PDF files, audio files, and videos that you or your users upload. Once an item has been added to the media library, you can use it in articles or pages of the site.

Manage the pages of your WordPress site

It is similar to the “articles” screen, but it is intended for managing the pages of the site, such as the Privacy Policy page, about us, and other pages of the site. Creating a new page is similar to creating a new article, except that pages do not accept labels, No tags. You can create, view, and edit pages with ease, enter the “pages” screen and try for yourself.

Reader comments on WordPress

This page displays written comments on articles posted on your site, this page is very important, because you will need it to manage comments. Annoying comments (Comment spam) are inevitable, a lot of comments on the topics of your blog or site will be inappropriate, and some of them will contain offensive language.

Some will also try to stuff links to their sites in the comments. Fortunately, WordPress offers the Akismet add-on, which comes packed with WordPress, filters all comments on the site, and compares them with a ready-made database to monitor all kinds of annoying comments.

Appearance

From the “appearance " page, you can control the appearance of the site, as you can change the template, and search for new templates in the WordPress repository. To search for new templates, click on the “add new” button at the top of the theme page, WordPress will take you to another page, and type the keywords you want to search for, such as sport or education.

You can also search for templates by their type and characteristics, for example, you can limit your search to templates dedicated to blogs, commercial websites, or news.

You can also customize the appearance of the site when creating a WordPress site through the “Customize” option that you will find in the submenu. And modify the appearance of the site and see the change directly. This greatly facilitates the work of WordPress template designers.

Widgets are spaces that can be used to show additional content related to the page, information about the author, stock prices on the stock exchange, match results, and more. WordPress comes with a large number of ready-made widgets, you can also create your own.

Also in the submenu, you will find the “lists” page, and, as the name suggests, it is for managing site lists. You can use it to create a new list or edit existing ones.

The last page of the “Appearance” menu, dedicated to template developers, is the “template editor” page, as it allows them to edit WordPress templates directly from the Control Panel, on the whole, I do not recommend you use it unless you have experience and technical expertise in WordPress. Because the slightest mistake may spoil the mold.

WordPress website extensions

WordPress plugins are scripts that contain a function or a set of functions written in PHP. These add-ons expand WordPress and add some new features to it. In addition to PHP files, the extension can contain other files, such as JavaScript files, CSS, and images.

WordPress is characterized by a huge number of free and paid extensions, and in all areas, there are SEO extensions, others for managing site members, extensions to secure your site, or to link it to electronic payment gateways, and there are extensions that can turn your site into an online store, such as WooCommerce, and others that can turn it into a social network, such as BuddyPress. Simply put, whatever you like, most likely there is an addition of its own.

Two add-ons come with the WordPress package, namely the Akismet add-on, which is an add-on to protect against comments and spam. Then the addition of international Halo (English: !Hello, Dolly), which when activated displays random phrases at the upper left end of the screen.

You can install the extension by clicking on the “Activate” button located under its name.

Some add-ons add a settings page to the control panel. For example, Akismet adds a new page to the “settings” menu, as the following figure shows

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Go to the new page and set up the extension to start using it.