Where Can I Learn How To Build A Website?

No matter what business you want to start a website is great for exposure and helping your business flourish.  It can be argued in this day and age that not only is it helpful but also essential.

Before making a website was a daunting task only reserved for the elite of the elite who knew the mystical and magical HTML code.  Now it is so simple anyone can build an amazing and great looking site.  Even still there is a learning curve, but not too great of one.

So where can I learn how to build a website? You ask.  Well there are many great resources out there but the one I suggest is Wealthy Affiliate.  Even if you do not want to start affiliate marketing they have some of the best free training out there for how to create and polish a website.  Whats more is you get two free websites to play around with.  The great thing is you can delete them and start new as many times as you want.

The Basics Of Starting Your Own Website

So the easy way to make a website is to use the versatile and highly customizable platform known as WordPress there are others but this one is the easiest for people to access and use.

Now Wealthy Affiliate does have training that is much better than what I can write here but I will try to take you step by step through how to set up your site and get it to looking amazing.

Using Wealthy Affiliates free websites you can make a great business website and keep it forever never having to sign up for the premium membership.

Starting Your Website

Step 1.  Using the link provided below you type in the domain name you want your website to be known for.

Now this will have Siterubix.com at the end but if you are not interested in affiliate marketing this will not affect much.  As a platform for making a free website this one cannot be beat since it doesn’t have many restrictions on how your use your website, and it simplifies the process greatly.  No more finding your dns servers and such.

Step 2.  Now that you have come up with a domain name you are not able to pick your theme for your new website.  I truly suggest something simple yes there are very shiny pretty themes out there but more often then not they just over complicate things and make the end user experience not optimal.  So keep it simple.  I like using the year themes this websites theme is Twenty Sixteen and it is nice and responsive.

Step 3.  Let Wealthy Affiliate Siterubix work its magic.  They install WordPress for you and install great plugins that will help you.  Now you can log into your website and start making it your own.  They have All In One SEO Pack Installed and it a very versatile and helpful plugin to have so I suggest you keep it.  They also have Exclude Pages From Navigation this plugin confused me until I read up on it and found that it is very useful for certain websites.  It is a nifty little plug in that allows you to create a page that is not available like the rest of the site this helps with monetization like havign people sign up for an e-book or something of the like the pages that are excluded have to have certain actions performed before a person can access them like give their e-mail address or something of the like.  Very helpful also the pages it hides are not able to be seen by Google either.  Their security for your site is very good so other security plugins are not really needed for most users.  Now there are normally plugins for just about everything.  They really help with customizing your website but also can bog them down if they are poorly optimized so make sure to read the reviews before you go plugin crazy like I did when I first created my first website I think it still has like 20 plugins on it.  This one only has 5 and it runs much better than the other one.

One of my first websites I went a little plugin happy and now just don’t want to clean it up just yet I will one day just not today.

Step 4.  Now is the time to create categories, create a menu and change the settings.  Don’t worry this is much easier than it sounds.

The first thing we are going to do is change our permalinks we want our links to reflect the name of your post not the time and date so go to Settings>Permalinks>Post name select the option and now it will always have the name of your post as its permalink.

Now creating categories this is where you articles are going to go into.  Go to Posts>Categories>Then write your name of a new category into the box titled Add new category then hit enter and it is created.

Now creating a top menu you go to Appearance>Menus> now you can add Pages, posts, categories to the top menu it really depends on what you want your website to look like.  Select what you want to appear in your menu and then click add to menu.  Now you can change the order top is lef and bottom is right so just drag and drop the items you added to your menu in any order you want and then click save menu and now your new menu is up and running.

Step 5.  Start writing click on the +New up top and select post and now you can start writing articles when you are done select the category you want it to show up in and click publish when you are done and your post is done.  You can also use the +New option to create new pages if you want things to be separate pages but it is harder to make them work with WordPress.  Experiment and find what you want.

Step 6.  Setting your site up so Google can see it.  In All In One SEO mouse over it and go to features and select XML Sitemaps then mouse over All In One SEO again and XML Sitemap will now be available click on it and and activate sitemaps.  This is where you will also update your sitemap as well if you added or changed things significantly this will bring the attention of Google and other search engines faster than their regular cycle.

Now is where I would talk about how to use and activate Google Analytics but that would be another post entirely and would make this already long post far too long.  Later I will write an in-depth guide to how to use Google Analytics.

As it stands if you followed this guide and you will be well on your way to making one amazing website that you can be proud of and the best part is you didn’t have to spend a penny on it at all.

If you have any questions please leave a comment and I will help where I can.