How to build a WordPress website

You should first adjust the general settings for your WordPress homepage. To begin, you can enter the “Website Title” (if you have no already done so during the installation process), as well as the “Subtitle”. These are basically the billboards for your website: browsers and search engines access this data to lead users to your site.  You should therefore spent a little extra time choosing your name, but don’t worry, you can always change these fields again and again.

To do this, make adjustments to the relevant read and write settings. Establish whether users can comment on publications and whether these comments require prior approval for publication and activation of pings and pingbacks.

Before you leave the Settings section, you should also deal with permalinks. A permalink is characterized by the fact that the same URL is always the same article (which is usually not the case with dynamic URLs). Permalinks standardize the links to your articles and guarantee that your content will be accessible at this address and that links from other websites will not get lost. You can also use “speaking URLs” which make the name of the article part of the Internet address, this is better for users and search engines.

 You retain the position of administrator by default after an installation, as an administrator, you have the option to add new users and manage privileges. If your project is managed by several users, establish who can do what.
 

Your choice of theme will determine the appearance of the web and the presentation of front-end content. Themes can be created by WordPress or a third party (free and paid). Adapt each time. For this, you can use the customizer. Also check that the design is responsive and use widgets if necessary.

Defining a menu structure will facilitate navigation for users and display links or certain categories of publications on static pages.

Plugins add extra features to your WordPress website. Under the menu option “Plugins” you should be able to find a variety of extensions. Askimet Anti-Spam comes pre-installed. This plugin helps you keep the comment area of your posts free of unwanted advertising. Other modules can be installed just like themes. Under “Install” you can add plugins from the official database, as well as manually install downloaded files. 

WordPress differentiates between posts and pages, although both are based on content. While posts are arranged chronologically, pages behave statically. Typical examples of pages in a blog are the “About”, the contact and the imprint pages. Conventional WordPress blogs usually contain much more posts than pages. However, as previously mentioned, you can create static web pages using WordPress too. These pages then have a much higher priority.

It is important to assign appropriate categories and labels to publications so that users can find them easily.

You can use the media library to store pictures, videos and audio files that you may use in your posts and pages. The images can also be accompanied by an alternative text that briefly describes what they show. In addition to being essential in SEO, the alternative texts serve to give greater accessibilty to the website.

To ensure the accessibility and security of your website, you should take a number of steps. First of all, you should be aware that installing the updates will help you minimize possible security breaches. Also, creating regular backups may be of great help against possible structural failures. You can create them manually or through plugins and free or paid programs that will make your job easier. Another option available is to guarantee password protection by choosing long passwords made up of letters, numbers and special characters. In addition, to protect yourself from cyber-attacks, you can use plugins like Limit Login Attempts, which blocks the user’s IP address after a certain number of unsuccessful access attempts.

WordPress is an easy tool to use, only taking a short familiarization phase. If you are running a website with regularly updated content, it is always advisable to make use of a CMS. You can use the backend to create, manage and publish your content, and thanks to numerous themes and plugins, your website does not have to look like an ordinary blog. Beginners however, will reach a limit in their ability to alter the design and individual adjustments. But anyone with a small amount of programming knowledge can customize WordPress to make it even more versatile.

The source code of the themes and plugins can be modified in the backend editor, although it is preferable to avoid this option if you have not yet worked with CSS or PHP code, as you may jeopardize the entire content of the web page created with WordPress.