How To Make Websites

When you’re starting a business $3000 is a lot of money to spend on a website – which is about what it costs these days to have a website professionally designed and developed. Wouldn’t it be great if you could short-cut the process, save the three grand and build your own website? The money could [...]

Choosing a domain name for your website or blog can be a tough decision, particularly if you don’t already have a business name that you’re going to use. Chances are you’ve already had a think about what you want to call your website, but before you rush off and register a domain name, learn a [...]

Your website needs to live on a computer that’s constantly connected to the Internet and can handle the onslaught of visitors. Good website hosting is almost as cheap as minimum chips at your local fish and chip shop so please, go with a professional and pay the $5 to $10 per month to have your [...]

Allrighty! Now we get to the fun part! In this section I’ll show you how to install the engine that’s going to drive your website. WordPress is a free piece of software that provides an easy to use publishing platform for your website. It will let you add content, images, video and audio to your [...]

This short lesson will show you how to login to your WordPress admin area. This is where you’ll be able to customise your WordPress website installation, add and update content and pages.

A quick word on logos and branding. If you don’t already have a logo for your business, then here’s how you can get a professionally designed logo for under $100.

It’s time to make your website look beautiful. This lesson will show you how to choose and install a WordPress theme. WordPress themes let you easily change the look and style of your website. Take your time choosing a theme. There are literally 1000′s of WordPress themes to choose from, some good, some bad and [...]

This lesson will show you how to add some essential plugins to WordPress to make it sing. Plugins are small add on programs that expand the functionality of WordPress and there’s a couple that I always use to add some handy functionality. It’s really very simple so don’t be scared – dive in!

We’ve added plugins, now we’re going to make a few changes to your WordPress installation to ensure maximum performance. WordPress is great right out of the box, but these tweaks will supercharge your WordPress website.

When I used to build websites for clients (not too long ago), the most challenging aspect of every project was getting the client to produce content. Even if you hire a copy writer, you still need to give them some copy to start with. For the non-writer, writing content for a website can seem like [...]

Before we go building all our pages for our website, I’m going to show you the basic page editing functionality in WordPress. WordPress makes editing website content easy and allows you to insert images, add links, format your text and even upload documents. If you can use a word processor such as Word (which you [...]

In this lesson, I’ll show you how to add more pages to your website. Remember Step 9: Writing Content? We’re going to be using that copy to populate your pages with content. The typical structure for most small business websites is as follows: Home About Products/Services (choose one or the other depending on the style [...]

Our website’s coming together but it’s looking a little, well … nude. In this lesson I’m going to show you how to add some content to the sidebar (in this case right hand column) of our website. I’ll show you how to use WordPress’ widgets to easily populate your sidebar area with content. Widgets are [...]

The home page, the most important part of your website, we’re going to make this our news area, otherwise known as a blog. This is where you can keep your customers and website visitors informed about the latest and greatest things happening in your business/world. Adding regular blog items is also a good way to [...]

Although you can see your website – and anyone who knows your domain name can see your websites, we need to make sure search engines such as Google can see it (otherwise know as “index your site”. Back in Step 8 we made our website private by changing WordPress’ privacy settings, so we could take [...]