The demand of small business websites has been increasing among marketers. Such websites include a “Home Page”, a “Products” or “Services” section, an “About Us” section and a “Contact Us” page. Many companies also like to add news/blog section page to publish latest information related to their business. One of the main reasons for developing WordPress site is that the process does not take much time. Even it is easy to maintain. Anybody who has little familiarity with internet can easily work on this platform. There are many designers who just build a WordPress site and give it to the site owner. After that, the site owner can easily make minor changes and update it. Anyone can learn the handy tips to update a WordPress website.
In this article, I am sharing with you some information on designing a small business website using WordPress.
What You Require
First of all, you need web hosting that supports PHP and MySQL databases. The next step is to download WordPress source code. Install a WordPress theme. There are many free and paid themes available that you can install your website. Install MySQL and PHP on your local machine to work on your site comfortably.
If you have already designed a customized stylesheet, you can use HTML in following ways:
Add a “header” div which contains the main navigation Add a “wrapper” div which includes the entire page All menus items for main navigation should be put in “li” tags Create specific “footer” div that includes the credits and copyright notice If the “page” div includes a sidebar and a main section, ensure that the sidebar markup appears after the content
Keep all the content of sidebar and article under a single “page” div
Installing WordPress
Design a MySQL database on your remote or local server and note down the username, password, database name and host In case you are working on a Mac operating system, the local host would look like “localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock” Now you need to unzip the WordPress source code into the folder where your website is located Ensure that the folder includes all important WordPress files with “Read/Write” permission Navigate to the URL in web browser like http://localhost/~richardmuscat/newwebsite.local and install it. After completing everything properly, you will get an admin password to log in with. Ensure that you remember the password and write it down somewhere safe for security point of view.
Note: If you are using the latest version of WordPress, you can choose the password as per your wish instead of getting an automatically generated one.
Basic WordPress Settings After logging into your WordPress account, first check your username located at the top right hand side of the page. Also, change your password from the random one to one which you can easily memorize.
The next step is unzipping your WordPress theme which you have downloaded and change its path to /yoursiteroot/wp-content/themes/newtheme.
In order to activate a new theme, you need to open the “Appearance” section in your WordPress account. Now, you can create web pages by clicking on “Pages” section. Add some of the pages like Home, Products, About Us, Contact Us, News etc. Ensure that you click on “Publish” button to save the changes. Thereafter, you can add content, images, videos and other stuff on your pages as per your requirements.
Finally, choose the “Settings” section on the WordPress control panel and then select “Reading” from the left hand side.
Set following options 1. Front Page Display – as “Static” page 2. Select an appropriate web page as Home Page 3. Then you can select a blog page where you want to publish your latest posts
4. Once you are done with all the changes, click on the Save button
Customize Your Theme
In case you already have any theme and satisfied with it, you can upload it on your WordPress account. However, if you want your own-designed theme, you can customize and modify it accordingly. Following details are useful for a site’s layout in HTML/CSS version.
Access your site in your desired HTML editor like TextMate or Dreamweaver. Access the theme folder where you can find an images folder, a stylesheet and PHP files.
Stylesheet: Usually, stylesheet is associated with WordPress themes. Here are some useful things that you can do with your theme:
Edit your present stylesheet as per your needs. You can also replace the coding of the “stylesheet.css” with own designed stylesheet.
Add an additional stylesheet referencing the header.php file.
PHP files: With the help of WordPress, you can use various .php files together.
These steps can help you a lot to design a professional website in WordPress.