This usually nothing to be surprise but in this case, the client has no clue on where to start, he claimed that his previous encounter with a developer that bailed on him when working on his website. When I asked where the website now hosted, he point me to a free blog site, blogger.com and the previous developer already been paid few hundred upfront for setting up the website on blogger.com and getting the URL for him. You can imagine that I’m a bit surprise, also frustrated and mad toward his previous developer for trying to cheap trick his client. The client said that when he asked for few modification, the developer right away claimed the website design cannot be customize and tell the client he can choose the ready template from blogger.com, after than no response whatsoever.
Hearing the client side of story make me felt sorry for him and wanted to help him as much as possible. Since the client is a personal friend of a previous client, I don’t hesitate to help him to setup a proper website so he/she can start blogging.
This is a long term collaboration that include building, maintain and optimize the website for SEO and I’ve chosen WordPress as the website content management system. Here’s 5 important step for building a website using WordPress.
1. Choosing suitable web hosting
Since this is for continued long term work for the client, I will be setup and maintain the website hosting for him using my own name and credit card. Reminder: only do this if you have absolutely trust on the client or he already paid upfront for work, in this case, the client already upfront $500 for starting the work. It’s a two side trust since his friend (my previous client) assured him of my work.
Choosing domain (the client already purchase domain name) and choosing web hosting and setup web hosting already been covered so many time and better details can be found here. However choosing which hosting plan to purchase is important factor to consider. In my case, the client objective is to build a lifestyle blogging community with advertisement option such as Amazon and Google Ads.
So, choosing a shared hosting is out of the question, dedicated hosting is too much for new site, maybe when traffic per-day getting around 10,000 hits that we would consider choose to upgrade the hosting. For now, we choose the “Managed VPS hosting” as the suitable hosting plan for us. Techradar compiled a lists of best manage VPS hosting for 2020.
2. Choosing suitable content management system (CMS)
Without a doubt WordPress is the most popular CMS today, it is easy to setup and manage posting schedule. There’s an alternate option on CMS, Magento but the client did not or not going to run any ecommerce type content in his website so this is not necessary since Magento is purposely built for ecommerce type content.
Giving the client the opportunity to test out WordPress posting, drafting and scheduling in my test server and he really like how easy it was, no need to be a rocket scientist to post a simple content, drafting been a useful features he said and he usually do content draft in Google docs and now prefer WordPress drafting process.
Read also: Top 5 PHP CMS in 2020
3. Choosing suitable theme for website
WordPress offer wide selection of free themes in their themes directory. You could choose from magazine style, classic two columns, and three columns if needed more space for content, they even got a custom grid style themes that suitable for product presentation or portfolio. If you’re looking for more “premium” features on theme but don’t want to spend a dime, you can download free WordPress themes outside of their directory, there’s one or two trustworthy theme download sites such as:
But wait. What do I mean by “premium” features? I meant without editing the theme template, you can change the website font and color style, and even have built-in theme goodies such as schema markup for SEO, properly coded HTML tag or maybe pass the W3C check, among others. These are few of the features that mostly available only on paid premium themes. Ok. Back to the list:
Themeforest.net
Having 56 million premium themes sold, this achievement makes Themeforest a household name whenever “premium WordPress themes” mention. It’s not surprise they also want to contribute to WordPress community with their pack of free WordPress themes available on their site.
MagPress.com
With its long history of providing free WordPress themes, active since 2004. MagPress is definitely one of the must visit website for free themes download. Their “Full features, no lock, try free, if like, consider getting a developer version” way of business is great opportunity for users to try their themes full features, without any locking features which I’ve seen in many “freemium” type WordPress theme download.
Most of their themes comes with full options on font and color styles such as Combomag. You can easily change your website fonts and layout color within theme options or customizer. One downside on their theme collection is some are encoded with protection on author/contributor link and sometime web hosting server return PHP error on the theme activation, rare case though unless you’re on free hosting or really cheap unmanaged shared hosting.
However you could choose to remove the encoded link by purchasing their developer or paid version, pricing around $37, but I was told that you can get discount if you subscribes to their Facebook fan page.
Want more? Here’s a full list of alternate free WordPress themes download sites.
4. Choosing appropriate plugins for website
Similar concept as building your pc, you need extra hardware upgrade to make it run faster and smoother. In this case, it’s for your WordPress website. However you’ll need to choose carefully on which and how many plugin to install so it won’t bloated and slow down your website. According to WordPress community, installing plugins could reduce 10-30% of website speed depending on what plugins you installed. Here are few WordPress plugins that will benefits your WordPress website.
- Yoast SEO – for website content seo
- Akismet Anti-Spam – prevent spams in comments
- Contact Form 7 – easy to setup contact form
- Google XML Sitemap – one click setup sitemap
- UpdraftPlus – easy backup and restore
- WP-Optimize – clean, compress, cache all in one
- All in One SEO Pack – alternative to Yoast SEO, easier setup
- Google Analytics for WordPress – for website analystic
- WP Super Cache – WordPress website caching
- Format Media Titles – best for automatic images SEO
- WordPress Share Buttons Plugin – AddThis
5. Choose to install SSL or not?
When you visit a website, you’ll notice there’s a difference between the site having SSL installed or not. It had different Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the installed one have https and the not installed have http only, without the “s”. But what is SSL? Its stand for Secure Sockets Layer, an encryption protocol that prevent website intersection data been stolen. Basically it show your visitors that your website is secure and protected. But do you really need it? One of the reason for the rising adaptation of SSL on website is because according to Search Engine Land, Google confirmed it’s one of the ranking factor in their search engine. Many website owner, link builders, affiliate website owner don’t want to misses the opportunity of this “gold rush” for ranking.
One thing for sure if you’re running a user based ecommerce website, then installing SSL on your website is recommended but for a normal blogger running a personal website that do not have any user data exchange then not really, however with the vast offering of Free SSL certificate, applying this secure method on your website had become a new norm for website owner.
Images credit: istockphoto.com
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