A Beginner's Guide to Building a Website for Business

If you’re starting a business you’re going to need a website. For a start a website is an opportunity to make a great first impression and is a great way to connect with your customers. And of course it will provide the platform for you to conduct your business, be it selling a product, providing professional services, engaged in B2B marketplace, etc. In this article we’re going to look at the basics of building a website for business in just a few easy steps using WordPress.

Getting a Domain Name

The first thing you’ll need is a domain name for your website, which should reflect what your business is. Choose an Accredited.ie Registrar to register, pay for and manage your domain.

Getting a Host

Now you have a domain you can start the process of creating a website. First you need to host the website – this is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet. Websites are hosted, or stored, on special computers called servers. When people visit your website, they connect to your server and your webpages are delivered to them through the browser.

The Web Hosting Top directory has listed Ireland’s Top 10 Best Website Hosting, January 2021

https://www.whtop.com/top.10-alexa-ranking/country-ie

Getting started

Once you secure the right plan for your business with your website host you’ll get ‘WordPress Auto-Install’ option or something similar – the keys to your car so to speak. Here you will log-in to your account that your host has set up and from here you can create your site. This usually entails entering your Site Name and the Domain you purchased earlier. Your host will now automatically install WordPress for you. When that’s done just be sure to save your login credentials.

Getting Under the Bonnet

Now it’s time to create your website. You will have an admin log-in that takes you to the backend of the website where you can do all your magic to create the look of your site. This is called the dashboard, where you will be able to easily administer all aspects of your website in one place – such as updating your website’s content, changing settings, backing up your data and much more.

Rather than access this through your host, we recommend you log in at https://yourcompanyhere.com/wp-login.php. Replace ‘yourcompanyhere.com’ with your domain name and enter it on your browser. Then, you’ll see your WordPress login page.

Everything from writing articles, to managing users, to even customizing your website is done here. You can see all the options neatly laid out in the sidebar on the left.

Let’s have a quick look at the most commonly used options here:

Posts: add, edit, and manage all kinds of posts
Pages: create, edit, and manage the static pages, such as ‘About Us’, and ‘Contact Us’
Media: manage the various media items such as images, audio, video, etc
Appearance: customize the looks of your site, including the design, menus, widgets
Plugins: add more features to your site
Settings: configure how your site works from here

Getting Your Theme

It’s time to start on how you want your website to look. WordPress contains a great variety of themes or templates. From here you’ll be able to customize everything to make it look just the way you want it. WordPress have given you the room; now it’s up to you to paint and decorate it.

Take some time to look through the themes and think about what you want the website to do for you – from blogs to business sites to online magazines, there is the right theme for you to choose for your site.

You can get a flavour for the variety on offer here:

https://wpallclub.com/free-wordpress-themes/

Next, go to the Appearance » Themes page and click on the Add New button. Here you can select your theme from: Featured WordPress themes, Popular WordPress themes, Latest WordPress themes, search for a specific theme, or search for themes with specific features.

Once you’re happy with the theme for your website, click on the ‘Install’ button. After that, click on the ‘Activate’ button that appears. Get a glass of champagne you’ve successfully installed and activated your WordPress theme!

Getting Your Design Right

Now it’s time to paint & decorate. Using the theme as a base to build from, you can customize your site in such a way that it works specifically for you. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance » Customize and play around with the settings and look and design of your site. The most common settings people use to define the look of their site are

Site Identity: Here, you can configure details such as the site title, tagline, and icon.
Colors: Customize the various colors of your website from here.
Menus: You can create, customize, and remove various menus through these options. Learn more about WordPress menus.
Widgets: As with menus, you can play around with your WordPress widgets and see how they look in real-time.
Homepage Settings: It allows you to choose what’s shown on the home page of your site.

Once you’re happy with how it looks, you can click on the Publish button at the top.

Getting Your Plug-ins

WordPress plugins are basically additional pieces of software that you can add to your site which in turn add new features to your website. Just like themes, there are numerous plugins available for for free

Take a look at the WordPress plugin repository

To install a Plugin, simply from your Dashboard go to Plugins on your sidebar. This will bring you a list of installed plugins. Click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top. Here’s suggestion of some Plugins that are very popular

Yoast: a search engine optimization
Everest Forms: create all kinds of contact forms
User Registration: create user registration and login forms, user profile pages, etc.
WP Rocket: improve your site’s performance through proper caching.
Elementor Page Builder: create beautiful looking web pages with absolutely zero codings.
WooCommerce: turn your website into an online store in just a few clicks.

Getting Content

Alright, you’ve built a beautiful website, you’ve added the bells and whistles – now it’s time to create content! You can create pages that will be permanent information on your website for example Contact details, Staff details, About Us section, Opening Hours, etc. And you can create posts – basically your blog – creating regular new content to engage with your audience / customers / readers. Both are easy to create, simply go to post / pages from your sidebar and select Add New. Here you create your post / page with appropriate images, links, etc that you want to include. And publish.

Getting Around

Finally you need to display everything you publish on your website and make it easy for visitors to get there. In WordPress we use the menu function to navigate the site. From the dashboard go to Appearance » Menus. This will bring you to the menu editor page. Name a menu and click on the ‘Create Menu‘ button. Here you can tick the pages you want to add to the site’s menu and you have the option to ‘Add to Menu‘. You can drag and order the items into the order that you want.

And there you have it – you’ve just built a website… and not a spanner in sight.