Setting up a website can be a daunting prospect for people who are ‘non-technical’ or simply not confident about or experienced in creating web pages. Although there are a number of WYSIWYG Web editors and CMS systems out there, WordPress provides an effective, relatively straightforward and free way to build a high quality website. Some of the many advantages of doing it this way are not having to pay or wait for a developer to make a website for you, although in many cases it is a good idea to ask an experienced ‘WordPress’ developer to set the site up for you in the first place.

Wordpress.org

By visiting the wordpress.org website anyone can download the latest version (3.2.1) for free. This version (unlike the Blog version available from wordpress.com) is a complete CMS website building solution. The WordPress ‘Personal Publishing Platform’ has its origins in the early 2000s and is often referred to as being the successor of b2/cafelog. The WordPress system is essentially built using dynamic pages, templates and databases i.e. using php and MySQL. The ‘open source’ nature of WordPress means that it has been and is being contributed to by developers everywhere. It gives the user a solid easy to use basic system that is fully customisable, and can be augmented by a huge directory of nearly 16,000 plugins. These are in a sense ‘bolt-on’ additions to the program which add whole new elements to your website automatically which would normally take a lot of programming time and knowledge to achieve.

An important thing to note however is that unlike a WordPress Blog which has free hosting (sitting on a Web Server), you do need to find another host of your own for a WordPress website. Wordpress.org does give examples of popular hosts although it is often best to take trusted advice e.g. from your Internet Marketing company of from an experience WordPress developer. A fairly typical process for developing a WordPress website would be:

Finding A Host

Quite apart from the cost of hosting you need to make sure your host meets the minimum requirements for hosting WordPress i.e. they support php version 5.2.4 or greater and MySQL version 5.0 or greater. Apache or Nginx are good although servers that support PHP and MySQL are the main thing to look for. You can marry the new website up with your chosen domain name in the same way as you can with websites developed using other platforms.

Downloading the Software

Go to wordpress.org, click on the download button and follow the instructions.

Read

WordPress provides lots of supporting documentation and instructions for you to read in order to find your feet.

Choose Your Theme

There are large quantities of professional looking website themes / designs which you can use as part of the package.

Content Preparation

Make sure you’ve done your keyword research (search numbers and competition), have plenty of high value content to set the site up with, and be clear on the aims for the website and what form you’d like your ‘sales funnel’ to take. Remember to focus on making your website as easy to use as possible for your target visitors.

Building the Pages

The dashboard within WordPress allows you to make and publish new pages with ease. Since key phrase-based page names (URLs) are important to search engines in terms of establishing the relevance of a page to a key phrase WordPress has a feature to help with this. Although WordPress naturally makes page names which contain question marks, numbers and other characters, these can be turned into more search engine friendly ‘permalinks’ or paths. By going to the ‘Custom Structure’ box and changing the ‘Permalink Settings’ you can make sure the URL structure (‘slugs’) are made up of relevant keywords / key phrases. You can create these so that the most important key phrase makes up the first part of the ‘slug’ so that it is given greater attention / relevance by the search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation & Plug-Ins

WordPress offers many ways to make a good degree of on-page Search Engine Optimisation easy.

Stop Words

Your URLs can be made extra search engine friendly by using a ‘SEO Slugs’ plugin which will automatically exclude all known ‘stop words’ from the URL. Stop words are words which are screened / out by search engines e.g. many of the smaller linking words used in our everyday language.

Hidden Page Elements (Meta Tags)

The page information that’s normally housed in the head of the Web page i.e. search engine information can be handled by the addition of the ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plugin. This can be set to ‘automatic’ so that it does the hard SEO work for you, or you can manually over-ride this and customise those elements yourself.

For more experienced WordPress users the ‘Headspace2 SEO’ plugin is the nest step up in handling these hidden elements and provides functions for a number of plugins including ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’, ‘HeadMeta Description’, ‘SEO Title Tags’ etc.

Converting to HTML

Since WordPress uses ‘dynamic’ elements to create and display pages there is an inevitable extra time lag while these elements are called up and pieced together online. Unfortunately this has 2 main disadvantages with search engines:

1. Some search engines are challenged more by ‘dynamic’ than ‘static’ page types.
2. Pages tend to rank lower in search engine results if they take a long time to load.

The ‘W3 Total Cache Plugin’ eliminates both of these problems by converting your WordPress pages into ‘static’ HTML.

Telling Google (and Everyone) About Your New Website

The ‘Google XML Sitemap’ plugin creates an essentially hidden file (an XML Sitemap) which gives Google information about your pages e.g. their contents, when they were last updated and the frequency of updates. The plugin allows you to create the sitemap and put the required site verification code into the head of your web pages.

By clicking on the ‘Privacy’ link in WordPress you can select an option to make your site visible to everyone e.g. the main search engines and archivers.