Why I chose WordPress for this tutorial:
While there are many websites out there such as Weebly and Wix which offer website builders, I personally prefer to use a CMS (content management system) for my sites because they don’t tie me down to a particular web host.
This is because I have the code of my site, images, content and theme in my possession. With sites such as Weebly or Wix, I would pretty much be dependent of their software and hosting. So if I were to decide to move my site one day, I would only be able to take my content with me.
So why would you ever want to move your site? Well, there are actually many reasons, but I will mention some of the main reasons below:
- Your web host is unreliable (the server goes down or is slow frequently).
- Their software changes and you no longer like it.
- Their fees go up.
So these are the main reasons why I decided to put together a tutorial that shows people how to build a basic website in just a few minutes using WordPress.
Can you create a professional looking business site using WordPress?
For those of you that are wondering “why WordPress?” or “isn’t WordPress used to create blogs?”
Well, I decided to use WordPress because it’s one of the easiest CMSs to use on the web today and it lets us create static pages so it’s not necessarily limited to blogs. In addition to that, WordPress is highly customizable since there are a ton of plugins and themes available for it.
Now for those of you that have already watched my video, I used the following free add-ons:
- Restaurateur (theme)
- Contact Us Form (plugin)
- WP Store Locator (plugin)
Can you use WordPress for any type of business?
While I created a restaurant site in the video, the same steps can be used for any other type of business because in reality, the theme, content and images are what makes a site target a particular niche. The structure of the site is the same.
Choosing a design for your site:
To make your site look a little more professional, I recommend changing the stock theme because in my opinion it looks a little bit on the casual side. To help you find a theme that is suitable for your business, I’ve decided to put together a list of business themes which target various industries — the list includes a lot of free themes.
As for the hosting, here is a list of hosts that offer 1-click WordPress installations:
Building your site:
So finally, we can get on with the actual tutorial. Below you can view my video which shows you how to build a business site and covers each step in detail from start to finish.
Can’t view the video? Watch it on YouTube
Additional tips:
After you’ve finished building your store, I recommend changing the “Just another WordPress site” tagline because if you don’t, this is what will show up in the title of web browsers, in Facebook, Google and other sites such as these.
To make these changes, simply go to your “admin panel > settings > general”.
I recommend replacing the existing tagline with your own tagline, motto, or a very brief business description which should be no longer than 69 characters in length. If your theme displays both the site title as well as the tagline in the META title tag (or your web browser’s title), you should make sure that the total length of both together is no longer than 69 characters.
Additional free plugins:
If you’d like your visitors to schedule appointments or reservations on your site, you can install plugins for this as well and the process is very similar to how I installed a contact form and store locator page in my video.
Below are 2 plugins that I’ve tested and recommend:
BirchPress Scheduler (a plugin that lets your visitors schedule appointments)
With BirchPress you simply add locations, add staff members and services, create a page as I did with the contact form and paste the shortcode below into it:
[bp-scheduler-bookingform]
With the restaurant reservations plugin, you simply create an empty page, then go to “booking > settings” and choose that page for the “booking page” using the select menu and fill out the rest of the settings as you’d like.