Monday 6 August 2018

What Basic Skills are Required to Build a WordPress Website?

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) available and it has been used to build millions of websites all over the world. As per an estimate, about 30% of all the websites on internet have been built using WordPress alone. The major reasons for WordPress popularity are its user-friendliness nature, being easily customizable and absolutely free to use. Whether you want to set up a simple personal blog, business blog to show off your products or want to build any other kind of website, WordPress is a great place for beginners to start building websites.

Good thing about WordPress is that you can even customize your WordPress theme and do Wordpress Plugin Development to build a custom and advanced WordPress site with lots of features and functionalities. That means, it is not much difficult to use WordPress to develop amazing websites. Even if you don’t have expert coding skills still you can use WordPress to build a website. if you are just starting out to create WordPress websites, you only need some basic skills and need to follow the steps given below to be able to create your first and then other types of WordPress websites easily.

●  Doing Thorough Initial Research

First step in building WordPress website is to do research and collect all the available information about WordPress. If you do your homework right, then it will save lots of your time later on. By this way, you will also come to know about the WordPress platform’s features, power, flexibility and potential. Let’s discuss some of the features of WordPress. 

●  WordPress has an incredibly easy-to-use user interface. 

●  Even if you don’t have much coding knowledge still you can set up a website without any problem. 

●  But more than a website, WordPress is a content-publishing platform. 

●  WordPress makes it very easy to update new content and attract visitors. 

●  WordPress is also a SEO friendly platform and has many SEO related features which help in getting higher search engine ranking of the websites. 

●  WordPress also has a huge developer community support. This community helps a lot the new WordPress users in resolving their issues.

Hence if you have good research skills, you can start with WordPress. By this way, you will be able to read a lot, ask questions and get help from the WordPress’s community of users and will be able to build an amazing WordPress website.

●  Planning in Advance
After doing the initial research on WordPress, the next step is to do proper planning before starting building your WordPress site. Before you install and set-up your website with WordPress, you need to take care of few things i.e.  you should do planning for these things in advance:-

●  Website name
●  Hosting Requirements
●  PHP and MySQL versions
●  Core update compatibility
●  Check Plugins and Themes compatibility
●  IDE or Text Editor
●  FTP Client Software
●  Web Browser
●  Content of the website

These were some of the things for which you have to do proper planning. This is an important step if you want to build a custom WordPress website.

  WordPress Installation

Now you just need ability to follow the instructions. Installing WordPress is quite easy. Most of the web hosting providers now have tools to let you install WordPress automatically. You just need to follow below instructions for a five minute WordPress installation guide:-

●  Download the WordPress package and unzip it.
●  Create a database on your Web Server and also create a MySQL user.
●  Rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php. Edit this file and add to your database.
●  the WordPress file to your web server.
●  Access the URL using a web browser.

WordPress is now installed and you have a website which you can use for any purpose.

●  Doing Settings in WordPress 
After installing WordPress, next step is to customize WordPress as per your preference. WordPress has many features for setting up like creating the user profile, setting the site name, publishing posts, adding pages and categories. You can also change how your WordPress site looks like. You can choose from thousands of WordPress themes. You can even create your own theme. You can also add new plugins to your WordPress site. You can keep on learning more about WordPress.

●  Coding Skills
Even if you have basic knowledge, you can build a WordPress site. But for advanced users learning coding is also a good thing. It is better you learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and bit of SQL. If you want to customize your WordPress site, themes, and plugins then slowly slowly you need to gain expertise in these programming languages and skills.

Conclusion

As we have just discussed, building a WordPress website is not at all difficult. You just need to be able to do research, ability to learn, ability to do proper planning, ability to follow required steps for installation, settings and customization and have basic knowledge of some programming languages. After acquiring the basic knowledge of WordPress development, you can even go for advanced part by learning to write codes in HTML,CSS, JavaScript and PHP and can even become an expert WordPress developer in short period of  time.