So, you have a business, and you’re thinking of developing and designing a WordPress website to showcase your skills and expertise to your audience worldwide. Well, here’s your complete guide on how you can create a business website with WordPress.
By having a website, you can target your audience worldwide, which means you’ll be able to find new customers quickly and more efficiently. Moreover, we’re living in the digital world, and having a website for a business has become imperative.
Therefore, if your business doesn’t have a website till now, you better start considering creating a website quickly because your competitors are already doing it.
In this article, we’re going to take you to step by step on how you can create a WordPress website for your business. So, without any further ado – let’s start building a goal-crushing WordPress website.
The Pre-Development Phase of Your Website
There are several things that you should consider before getting started on developing your WordPress-based business website. Know that strategic planning and implementation are two of the most important aspects that ensure success in the digital world.
Additionally, everything nowadays has evolved. Gone are the days when building a website was considered an extremely daunting task. Today, there are several page-building tools and free website builders available that you can use to create a website quickly.
However, ensuring the quality and user experience of the website is crucial so, here’s how we’re going to guide you on developing your WordPress website without the requirement of coding or hiring a developer:
- Choosing a domain name for your corporate website.
- Buying fast wordpress hosting.
- Installing WordPress.
- Creating a content outline for your corporate website.
- Selecting the best template/design as per your niche.
- Adding plugins, addons, or features to your website.
- The resources you’ll be needing to help you along the way and after your site has been created.
Which Platform Should You Choose To Build Your Website?
We’re going to recommend WordPress to you because firstly it is super-famous and secondly, it is the best for beginners. During the initial stage of the website development, beginners often make the mistake of choosing the wrong platform, which results in chaos in the long run of the website.
However, we will not let you make the same mistake. Start your website with WordPress simply because more than 39% of the online websites today are using WordPress.
WordPress gives you several built-in templates, designs, plugins, features, and much more to get started. You can easily leverage millions and thousands of features of WordPress instantly. Additionally, the platform is extremely easy to use and lets you create any kind of website you want.
Now that you’re done with selecting the best platform for your website let’s start building your business website.
Step #1: Essentials for Your Corporate Website
At the start, you need to take care of a few aspects. The following two items are required in the first step of creating your website:
Domain Name
The domain name would define your website for ages to come. This name should be based upon your business’s name; however, this is not necessary, but it is recommended.
Hosting
Hosting is probably the second most important aspect of your website because all the data, files, and backup of your website will be safely stored here. You can buy hosting from several hosting providers available over the internet, i.e., HostGator, GoDaddy, etc.
Step#2: Setting Your Corporate Website
Assuming that you’ve already bought the domain name and hosting, now you will be setting up your WordPress business website. For this part, you need to understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
In a nutshell, WordPress.com is a hosted solution, and WordPress.org is a self-hosted WordPress. Although there’s much more to both the platforms than just this, we’re going to leave this discussion for another time.
For now, you can select WordPress.org because it will instantly give you access to all of the features of WordPress right from the start. Next, you have bought the domain name and hosting.
WordPress recommends Bluehost as the hosting provider. It is one of the biggest hosting companies in the world. Bluehost also offers free domain name, SSL, and even a staggering 60% discount on web hosting so, the offer is quite unavoidable.
Step #3: Choosing the Perfect Domain Name for Your Corporate Website
If you’re ready to choose Bluehost as your hosting provider, simply click on the very first “Get Started” button you find on their website, select the pricing plan, pay the price, and voila, your hosting is now ready.
Now, you would have to select the domain name. Know that a domain name is critical for your success so, you need to spend some time choosing the perfect domain name for your brand.
Here’s how you can select the perfect domain name for your business:
- Always prefer the .com version.
- The domain name should be related to your business.
- If your entered domain is not available, try adding your location besides your domain name, i.e., LawnMoversTexas.com.
- Keep the domain name simple and memorable.
After researching and selecting the domain name, the next step would be to install your WordPress, which is step #4 so, let’s go!
Step #4: Install WordPress
After the domain name has been finalized, now you will be asked to enter your account information, name, address, phone number, email, etc. Finally, after entering all the information, you can finally purchase the domain.
After you’ve bought the domain, you’ll get an email regarding the login details of your C-Panel or control panel. If you choose Bluehost, they’ll automatically install WordPress for you, and you’ll be able to login to your WordPress website directly from the hosting dashboard.
In case you didn’t choose Bluehost, you may need to install WordPress all by yourself. WordPress.org themselves have this great guide on “How To Install WordPress” that you can read to easily and quickly install WordPress if it wasn’t installed.
Furthermore, after installing WordPress and signing-in to your WordPress website, you will be greeted by several options on the dashboard that you can use to easily customize and manage your business website.
Step #5: Building the Content Layout of Your Corporate Website
After installing WordPress and gazing at the feature-rich dashboard that WordPress has given to you – you may be thinking, “how can I leverage this to create my very own customized WordPress website” – well, don’t worry, we’re going to explain everything to you.
First and foremost, you need to focus on building the content layout of your website. Content is the most important thing in your website, so you need to figure out a clear, perfect, attractive, and suitable presentation for your content layout.
Keeping the goal of maintaining simplicity in mind, click on pages » Add New page to create a new page. You may see some content, image, or text in the beginning but don’t worry, start adding a little bit of content and images to your website. You can always delete or change them if you want in the future, so there’s no problem in adding content to your website.
Here’s a list of some of the most common pages that you may have come across when skimming through a business website and so, your website should also have these pages:
Homepage
This page is the main page of your website that your audience will land on once they enter your URL and hit the search button. Make this page more informative and engaging, both design and content-wise. Make sure it has CTAs so anyone can reach out to you easily.
About Us Page
This page is as the name suggests about your business. Several visitors would want to learn more about your business before getting to trust you, so; the “About Us” page would help them learn more about your business, core values, beliefs, history, and much more.
Services/Product Page
Perhaps the second most important page a website should have, this page would define what you’re offering to your audience. If a website doesn’t have this page, it will fail to brief the audience regarding the specific services or product that the brand is offering.
Contact Us Page
You may be thinking, “I’ve already placed CTAs on my homepage, so why should I create this page?” Well, all those CTAs placed on your website would eventually lead your visitors to the contact us page. On this page, your audience can easily enter their information and send their queries to you; therefore, you need to have this page as well. Plus, some visitors may be more comfortable with taking your phone number and calling you instead of just leaving a message so, it is highly recommended that you add a contact us page.
Moreover, you can also go on to create several other pages, i.e., blog, core values, insights, etc. It’s usually best to have access to some kind of landing page builder as well to have specific pages to send traffic to so that you can capture lead information.
Step #6 Selecting the Best Design for Your Website
By default, your WordPress would already have a basic template that you can use. However, we would recommend that you go on and search for some other templates that best match your business.
There are several free and paid templates that WordPress gives to its users; hence, you can select any one of the themes for your business and start rocking your design.
Our recommendation here would be to select a more minimal, simple, and clear website design template from the store. Know that simplicity and clarity are the keys in the digital world. Your aim should be to create a website that is super-user-friendly and not sophisticated or complex.
You may have seen several websites so, try to mimic those who managed to impress you. Usually, a website has the navigation menu on the top, and the homepage has a banner with a greeting on it or with the one line that would define the entire business, followed by a CTA.
Once you’ve got your theme, go ahead and install it. If you don’t know how to install a WordPress theme, simply search for it on the internet, and you’ll find your guide.
Moreover, each WordPress theme is designed separately. Therefore, it takes a different approach to edit or customize the appearance of specific themes. You find the Customization option located beneath the Appearance button on the WP admin page.
From here, you can easily tweak, change, revamp, add, remove and do much more to your website. This option would let you customize the entire site quickly and in real-time. WordPress also gives you the option to preview your changes before publishing them.
Also, if you’re not comfortable with the customization option, you can always use the drag-and-drop page builder like “Beaver-Builder” to create a customized website.
Step 7. Add Plugins To Add Features To Your Website
To add features to your website, WordPress gives you several plugins. These plugins are generally there to make your website feature-packed and functionality-oriented.
Although there are ways to customize the functionality and features of the website, like adding a CTA or Content form, the use of a plugin makes the process of adding features easier and quick.
Using plugins also minimizes the need for coding and programming. Moreover, there are over 58,000 free plugins that WordPress gives you, so; you pretty much never run out of plugins to add to your website.
Conclusion
That’s all, folks.
Here’s a nutshell version of how you can create your website; however, even this nutshell version can easily enable you to build your website and start nailing your online presence.
Moreover, we tried our best to guide you regarding the hosting, domain, design elements, development, and even feature-adding. Now you can go through all of the details mentioned in this article. You can implement them to test how much you’ve understood.
By the end of the implementation, we’re pretty sure that you’ll have the website that you created, and you would be rocking your business’s digital presence in no time.
Just keep in mind that you need to customize your website and make it look more like your brand so that it reflects and conveys the message of your brand to your audience.
