This Tutorial will show you How to Create your First Website in easy steps in this tutorial.
Creating your First Website can be exciting and nerve-racking.
Start off 2021 by creating your first website, it can be a business website, store website, or personal website.
This whole process from zero to finish will take you about an hour or so.
Create your First Website: Step # 1 Choose your Domain Name
When Building your first Website, you will need 2 things to get started.
First, you need a Domain Name which is the name and address where visitors can find you, for example, my domain name is juanvillar.com.
If it is a business you can try thebusinessname.com, if it is a personal site you can use yourname.com or other extensions if the .com is not available.
For this first step just think of what you would like your domain name to be. We will cover more in the next step
Create your First Website: Step # 2 Get Web Hosting and Register the Domain
The second thing you need to create your first website is web hosting.
Web hosting is a service that hosts and stores your website files (content) on a secure server that is always up and running. Without a web host, your site will not be accessible for others to read and browse.
Affordable and reliable web hosting for new websites costs usually between $3 to $10 a month. Less than a cup of coffee, but an important investment for your website’s success.
When we started our Website, I found that it was easy through a site called BlueHost
What is BlueHost?
Bluehost is one of the largest website hosting providers and powers millions of websites. Learn more about our secure and reliable hosting services today!
Features To Look For When Choosing Web Hosting:
- Free Domain name with an SSL Security Certificate
- One-Click Installation of WordPress for your blog
- Custom Email Accounts
- Unlimited bandwidth
- 24/7 Customer Support
BlueHost is our recommendation for the best Web hosting provider because all those features come with their plans standard.
It also simplifies your life as this is a one-stop-shop for the domain name, WordPress for your blog, and Web Hosting for your site.
Create your First Website with BlueHost:
The First Step is to Click here to get started with BlueHost
It will take you to this page and then you will click the button “Get Started”
After you click the Get Started button you will choose your Plan
You will have to choose a timeframe and the pricing will adjust. If you are planning on having more than one website you should choose the Plus Plan.
If you will be content with just one website choose the Basic, and choose the time frame on the top. Don’t worry you can always upgrade or downgrade your plan at a later date.
BlueHost will ask you to enter your Domain Name now on this page
Once you create a new Domain you will be guided to the payment page.
Enter your payment details on this page
After you have completed the registration process, you will get a screen that asks you to install WordPress.
Once you answer a few questions BlueHost will automatically install WordPress on your site.
After WordPress is installed you will get a screen similar to this,
An Awesome Job your First Website is up and Running!
Test Your Website By Typing in Your Domain Address:
For this example, I will type in juanvillar.com into Google and you will see that everything is up and running.
You type in your domain name and your site will show up.
Create your First Website: Step # 3 Customize Website
Congratulations, your first secure Website is live, now let’s get into the customization aspects in WordPress.
Verify SSL/HTTPS Settings
An SSL certificate makes sure that your website is delivered to your visitors securely.
Bluehost automatically adds an SSL when you create a new website or install WordPress. To check your site’s SSL status, do these steps:
- Log in to your Bluehost portal
- Click on “My Sites”
- Find your site and click on “Manage Site”
- Go to the “Security” tab
- Under “Security Certificate,” you will find your “Free SSL Certificate” status
If everything went well, you should see a lock icon next to your domain name in the web browser.
It may take a few hours before the SSL is set up completely, but that shouldn’t stop you from continuing to build your website.
Choosing a Theme for your Website:
WordPress has thousands of FREE and paid themes available.
If you want to change your theme at a later date you can just by pressing a button.
Install the Theme:
Go to your Dashboard and scroll down to where it says appearance.
When you hover over appearance go to the right where it says themes
There you can scroll and finalize your theme. Just remember you can always change the theme at a later date.
Add Widgets:
In WordPress, widgets are blocks of content that you can add to your site’s sidebars, footers, and other areas. … WordPress widgets were created to provide a simple and easy way for WordPress users to control the design and content of their site without having to code. Most WordPress themes support widgets. In the beginning, there are several widgets that I recommend you install.
Wp Forms for WordPress:
WPForms is the best WordPress contact form plugin on the market. It allows you to quickly create a contact form and add it anywhere on your website.
Also, It comes with a drag and drop form builder, ready-to-use form templates, Gutenberg block, and a sidebar widget. It is a premium plugin with a free version available as WPForms Lite.
Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails:
WordPress comes with a recent posts widget, which displays a plain list of your recent posts. Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails allows you to display recent posts with thumbnails.
It uses the featured image or the first image in a post as a thumbnail. You can also adjust the height and width of the image from the widget’s settings screen.
Easy Table of Contents:
Easy Table of Contents plugin allows you to easily add a table of contents to your articles. It comes in handy if you often publish long-form articles. Adding a table of contents helps users quickly jump to different sections.
The plugin can automatically insert a table of contents to longer articles or you can manually add it. Additionally, it also comes with a widget to display the table in the sidebar.
Pop-ups by OptinMonster:
This powerful plugin offers a suite of lead generation tools, including the ability to create highly-customizable forms in the form of pop-ups or sidebar widgets to collect information. The drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to quickly build customizable forms — alternatively, you can choose from one of their templates.
OptinMonster also allows integration with email marketing services like HubSpot and MailChimp, so you can easily export contacts to your existing lists along with all their data. This is a useful tool for collecting email addresses and syncing with other services, but you want to be careful that your pop-ups aren’t too intrusive. You don’t want to negatively impact the user experience.
Install Plugins:
There are over 58,000+ WordPress plugins that you can choose from. This makes it extremely overwhelming for new users to find the right plugin for their website.
Having the right set of WordPress plugins and tools can help you grow your online business. My must-have WordPress plugins for websites in 2021.
Yoast SEO:
SEO helps you get more visitors from search engines to your website. While WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box, there is so much more you can do to increase your website traffic using SEO best practices.
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. Out of all the WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast offers the most comprehensive solution with all the features and tools that you need to improve your on-page SEO.
Grammarly:
Excellent grammar checking tool that comes with plagiarism detector, vocabulary enhancement, and more.
Create your First Website: Step # 4 Add Pages/Posts:
From a technical point of view, a web page is just a document on the web. It’s not very different from your traditional Word document apart from it having your website’s branding elements such as the header and footer.
Web pages are easy to create in WordPress.
Most websites will find the following pages essential:
- Homepage – it’s the first page that your visitors see when they go to your website
- About page – a page explaining what your website is about
- Contact page – a page letting visitors contact you
- Blog page – a listing of your most recent blog posts; if you’re not planning on blogging, you can use the blog page as a place for your company news and announcements
- Services page – if the website you’re building is for a business, use this page to showcase your services
- Shop page – for companies that want to launch an eCommerce store
- Privacy Page
Final Thoughts:
I hope this guide has been helpful for you in creating your first website. Once you get your site up and running the next step is actually acquiring an auto-responder for your emails. Our top recommendation for an email autoresponder is GetResponse. GetResponse has a 30 day free trial without any credit cards and then it is $15 per month for the basic. Another great option is Aweber.
Aweber also has a free trial and then it is around $ 16 per month. We use both Aweber and GetResponse on our site.
Autoresponders will do all the heavy lifting for you once you start developing an email list. You basically set them up once and as new subscribers opt into your list they start sending the emails for you.
To Your Success
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