ServiceNow, an intriguing term that has been increasingly gaining popularity among IT professionals in the last couple of years. But, what is ServiceNow, what is ServiceNow development, why do you even need to know about it, and most importantly, how is it beneficial for you or your business? 

Are you looking to build a website for your business or yourself? Do you want to build a WordPress Website for your business for it? If your answer is yes, then look no more, you’ve reached just the right place. From WordPress to website development, hosting and deployment, in this article we will cover everything you need to know to build your website with WordPress. But before getting to know how to build a WordPress website, let us first clear up some basics about WordPress?

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) on the internet that powers around 42% of all websites on the web. However, now the question arises what is a CMS? CMS is a software that allows its user to create, modify, and manage content without any need of writing codes for the website. Instead, the CMS does all the coding and technical work by itself letting the user focus on the content.

WordPress offers you a modern, minimal, and very easy-to-use interface. It allows the user to manage text formatting, images, videos, and hyperlinks easily and efficiently. It also ensures web page creation and publishing blogs extremely easy, even for a user who has no technical knowledge.

Now let us understand how a website works and what role does WordPress play in building websites?

How to Build a WordPress Website?

Website development is quite similar to building a house. To build a house, first, you need a piece of land. The piece of land is uniquely identified by its address. On the land, a concrete structure is built in a planned way. The plan includes the number and size of rooms, sections, and subsections inside them. After that, the interior is designed by applying different colors and adding decoratives. And finally, when the house is ready, you give it a name like “Krishna Cottage”, “Haven”, “Fairview” etc. that represents the identity of the house.

Let us now understand how websites work.

Domain and Web Hosting

Consider your website similar to a house. You need a space on the web to build your website. You’d think that you have storage space on your computer, can’t you use that space for building your website? Technically you can, but as the web is always live, your website must be accessible to everyone on the internet at all times. For that, you’ll have to keep your computer turned on at all times which is not possible for everyone. That’s where web hosting services come in. A web hosting service provides you a space on the internet which is accessible to everyone at all times.

The space provided is uniquely identified by an IP address (ex: 192.168.29.01) just like a piece of land is identified by a unique address. On that web space, you can create files and folders of your website which act as the concrete structure and rooms of a house. And finally, the UI of your website is similar to the interior of a house.

Now, as you give an understandable name to your house to make it more identifiable, similarly you need to give a name to your website which is easily memorable and identifiable for people as most people can’t remember a large number of complex IP addresses. That name is called the domain name of your website (ex: amazon.com).

WordPress Website Development

A WordPress website is built on top of the CMS WordPress which is nothing but a compilation of pre-built files that perform a particular set of functions. You don’t have to write the code for those pre-defined functionalities, again and again, instead, you can use the functionality with the help of the User Interface provided.

Now that we have understood the basics of website development and WordPress we can learn about WordPress website development in detail.

How to build a WordPress website on your computer?

Setting up a WordPress website is a matter of minutes and even a newbie can get going with it in no time. There are multiple ways to set up a WordPress website. Many hosting providers provide an option of one-click installation of WordPress. In that option, you only need to fill in a few necessary details about the website like its name, tagline, administrator’s username, and password, and the rest of the installation is automatically completed by the hosting service provider.

In this article, we’ll illustrate how to build a WordPress website from scratch on your local computer, so that you can try out WordPress first before buying a domain and hosting.

Step 1: Download and Install XAMPP/WAMP

To build a WordPress Website and operate it on your computer, you need a server environment on your machine. You can either install PHP, MySQL and Apache 2 separately, or, you can choose the easier option and install a local server software like XAMPP or MAMP that includes all these packages and install them together.

You can download XAMPP from here.

 

 

Step 2: Download and Extract WordPress

You need to download WordPress from its official site. Once you’ve downloaded it, paste the compressed file in the “htdocs” folder inside the XAMPP installation directory.

Extract the data from the compressed file in the same directory. Rename the folder as per your need. For demonstration purposes, we’ve renamed it to “testWordPress”.

 

 

Step 3: Start XAMPP and create a Database

  1. Open the XAMPP control panel from your programs list.
  2. Start Apache and MySQL
  3. Open a browser and type “localhost/phpmyadmin” in the URL tab
  4. To create a new database, click on the “New” option in the menu visible on the left side.
  5. Enter the name for the new database and select “collation” from the dropdown menu. We have named it ‘testdatabase’.

 

Voila! The database is created.

Step 4: Create a WordPress Website installation

  1. Open a new tab in any browser and enter “localhost/[name of the WordPress folder]”.
  2. Select Language.
  3. Enter details for database connection.
    In the Database Name field enter the name of the database
    In the Username field enter “root”
    Leave the Password field blank
    In the Database Host field enter ”localhost”
    Leave the Table Prefix field as it is

 

Click Continue.

  1. Click on “Run the installation” on the next page. This will initiate WordPress installation.
  2. On the following page enter details about the website: Site Title, Username, Password, Your Email. You’ll need these credentials to log into the WordPress dashboard.
  3. Click on “Install WordPress”.

Congratulations! You just installed WordPress.

Step 5: Log into WordPress Dashboard

  1. Enter “localhost/[name of WordPress folder]/wp-admin” to go to the dashboard.
  2. If you aren’t logged in then, you’ll be redirected to the login page. Log in with your credentials.
  3. After logging in, you’ll be taken to the dashboard.

Bravo! You’re doing great. Now you can customize your website as per the needs of your business.

How to design a WordPress website?

Creating a WordPress website tailored to your business’s needs is very easy. You have multiple options to customize the UI and functionality of your website.

User Interface (UI)

You can choose from two ways to customize the User Interface and looks of your website.

  • Themes
    Installing a pre-built theme is the easiest way to design a WordPress website. There are 8000+ themes at wordpress.org available for free. Thousands of paid themes are also available on several marketplaces across the internet. There are themes available for almost every kind of business at a price range of 0$-250$.Installing a theme is very easy. You can install a theme from the “Themes” section available under the “Appearance” option in the main admin menu. You can also import demo data for a theme with just one click. Popular themes include Astra, Neve, OceanWP, etc. which come with many predefined templates for different businesses.
  • Builders
    WordPress theme builders are a dream come true for people who do not have the technical knowledge for developing websites. Builders allow you to create the UI for your website from scratch with drag and drop functionality. With builders, you can add or remove rows, columns, objects like cards, buttons, images, videos, and do much more without having to write a single line of code.There are many free and paid builders available for WordPress. The most popular ones include Elementor, WPBakery, Divi, Brizy, etc. WordPress theme builders are a blessing not only for non-tech-savvy people but also for developers. Many paid builders offer an option to add custom code. So WordPress developers can use the ease of drag-n-drop functionality to build most of the UI and can also add custom code wherever they need.

The best part of Themes and Builders is that Themes are built using builders. You can install a theme and completely customize it, according to your business needs with the help of builders without having to worry about code.

Functionality

You can extend the functionality of your website with the help of plugins. If you think of a feature to integrate into your website, then it is most probably already developed in the form of a plugin that you can instantly install into your website with a single click. You can choose from more than 52,000 free and paid plugins available for WordPress.

Installing a plugin is just as simple as installing a theme. You can install a plugin from the Plugins section link to which is available in the main admin menu.

Roles

It may not be possible for a single person to manage a big blog or any huge website like an e-commerce store alone. For that, you can assign different managerial roles to different people to make the management of the website easy. By default, you can assign the roles of Author/ Editor/Contributor or Administrator to a person. Users that sign up on your website are assigned the role of Subscriber.

Custom WordPress website Development

Even after providing such high flexibility, WordPress is not limited to pre-defined themes, plugins, post-types, or roles. WordPress is an open-source software licensed under GPU license which makes it free to use, modify, and redistribute.

There is no functional limit to what you can achieve with WordPress. If you need interactivity in the front-end of your website that can’t be fulfilled by a predefined theme, then you can develop a custom theme from scratch with HTML/CSS/JS. If you want to add functionality to your website that can’t be fulfilled by a plugin then you can even develop a custom plugin to fulfill your requirements.

WordPress is extremely flexible giving you the power to achieve virtually anything for a small to medium scale website.

Conclusion

There is a reason why WordPress is the most popular CMS on the internet and now you know it. You can get started with it right now, build a WordPress website and get it up and running not within days but hours.

If you want a website to be custom developed that is tailored to the specific needs of your business then, check out this list of top WordPress Development Companies on Supersourcing. These are experienced professional WordPress developers that will help you build the perfect website for your business and add your desired functionality to the website.