Make A Website (No Coding Required)
Whatever your business, you’re going to need a website. Even if it’s just to show your contact details. A website is one of the first steps into marketing your business and getting new clients.
In this step by step guide, you will go from having nothing to your very own fully dynamic website. Absolutely no coding knowledge is required. You will learn how to build a website from scratch for free.
And this isn’t just about making a 3 page static site. You’ll be able to edit your site, scale, add features, ad manage users and even start building websites for clients.
Step 1 - Choose where to build your website?
You have 3 options :
- 1 - use a paid website builder
- 2 - hire a professional developer or agency to do it for you.
- 3 - make your website with Wordpress, and build websites for free, forever!
Why we prefer Wordpress?
It’s free
35% of all websites are built on Wordpress. It’s the most used CMS in the world.
Tons of plugins for your to personalise your website to your business
Hundreds of themes to make your site look awesome
Thousands of developers are specialised in Wordpress so you'll find somebody to help. And you can pretty much build anything.
It's very easy to build responsive and mobile friendly websites.
To sum up, Wordpress is the no brainer option here.
Step 2 - Get a domain name and hosting
So Wordpress will be awesome at managing your content. Now you need to get a domain name (the address of your website) and a hosting (to store the files of your website). Think of this as: the domain is your home address and your hosting is the land on which your home is build.
Hosting prices vary a lot. We have compared basic Wordpress hosting options and have selected a hosting that provides a free domain name for the first 12 months.
Signup to
https://www.ionos.co.uk/hosting/wordpress-hosting
How to choose a domain name?
Option 1: a name to match your business name such as mybusinessname.com
Option 2: find something catchy, if possible related to your business main keyword.
Unfortunately a lot of domain names are already taken, so you may need to get creative. But please don't get blocked at this stage. The hosting provider we have chosen gives a free domain for 12 months. Please just pick any name quickly and move to the next step.
>>>> Hosting Setup <<<<
Step 3 - Setup your website
Install wordpress
Step 4 - Design your website
Wordpress works with themes. Over 4000 free themes are ready for you to user.
If you want to go premium, you’ll find a good selection on ThemeForest for around £50.
Once you’ve found the theme that you like, simply hover over the theme screenshot and click on “install” and then “activate”.
For this example we will use the pre-installed theme Twenty Twenty.
Important: don’t worry about installing and deleting themes until you find the right one. The content of all your pages and posts will stay the same.
Step 5 - Adding content to your website
The Wordpress structure is based on Pages and Posts.
What is the difference between pages and posts? Not a lot..
Posts are ranked by date
Pages are static content that will stay true for a longer period.
How to use posts and pages?
Pages are great for about pages and contact pages
Posts are great for blog posts and news.
Add pages to your website
Adding Posts
Grouping your posts with Categories
Adding Pages And Posts to the menu
Step 6 - Basic Settings & Customisation
Menu > Settings > General
Title: Change the name of your website
Tag line: Change the tagline
Menu > Settings > Reading
Setup a static front page
Menu > Settings > Discussion
Disable comments
Menu > Settings > Permalinks
Modify your permalinks
Step 7 - Adding Plugins
Wordpress comes straight out of the box with a lot of cool tools. However you’ll be amazed with all the features that developers have been working on to make sure your website is just that little bit more special. The Wordpress community is massive and most of these plugins are free.
It can be tempting to overload your website with hundreds of plugin addons. I’d recommend to go slow and make sure you get to grips with running a basic Wordpress first.
Our selection:
Yoast: being highly ranked on Google is key. Yoast is a great free plugin to help you work on your SEO.
GA Google analytics: make sure you’re tracking your visitors. We create a full add analytics to your website guide here
Elementor: this plugin has basically made anybody a webdesigner. You don't even need a theme anymore. Simply create your own templates with it's powerful drag and drop page builder.
ACF: Advanced custom fields. This plugin will allow you to create a database with dynamic content.
That’s it! There you have it. Your website is live!