Ginger Nut Creative | Building your own WordPress Website.
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25 Oct Building your own WordPress Website.

Posted at 00:09h in Design, Presentations, Uncategorised by
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Tip. 1 Ensure that you know what you want your website to do. How will it help grow your business? How will it help reach out to your target audience? What kind of functionality do you need, now and in the future?

Tip. 2 Secondly, then decide what you need to say not just to your prospective audience but also to Google. A great starting place is to identify your keywords, we use a lot of jargon in business, but our clients use plain English when searching for information. So as a professional, you may refer to PMI, but if most people are searching under Health Insurance, that’s where you need to start. Writing your copy first is fundamental to ensure you communicate what you do, your key messages and USPs but also because it will determine the framework of your website, how many pages you need etc. It also makes you really think about your business & of course good copy also helps your SEO & ranking.

Tip.3 Now you’re in a better to position to decide what to do next, if you are not a programmer you may choose to use a WordPress template. (Try Themeforest) .There are lots available. Don’t be distracted by how they look if they don’t have the functionality you require. Do however, see how many times the template has been sold and look at the feedback and the level of technical support it commands.

Tip 4. Okay you want to start your build, you need an organogram, you need to plan your menu, decide where your main pages and then sub pages will go, for example “Dancing”  on the main header with sub categories of  “Latin, Jazz and Ballroom” underneath. Then decide what you need on each page.

Tip 5. Prepare all of your photographs. Make sure they are the right size and the right resolution, there’s nothing more damaging to the look of a website than fuzzy photos. If you don’t have quality photos try sites like Shutterstock for photos and vector images. But also make sure that they are optimised for web use, (Smush is a great plugin for optimising your photos. ). Large photos will slow down your download time and clients won’t wait very long before trying another website.

Tip 6 If you have never built a WordPress website before, you may find the Dashboard quite complicated. We would suggest as you investigate each part of your soon to be gorgeous website, that you rename wherever you visit and add text and placeholder images that you can recognise. So for example, when you go into the Dashboard you may see Hompage1, Hompage2, Homepage3, this is the beauty of a WordPress template, you can have several different looks, so when you find the one you want, rename it….”My Website Homepage” Also if you can document, what you have done, which buttons you have pressed as you go it will help- trust us in the long-term it will save you time.

Tip 7.  You are now ready to start your build proper – here’s the rub websites properly done take a long-time to build and populate. Calculate approx 4 hrs for your menu & homepage page and approx 2 hrs for each of your remaining pages, Try and approach it in bitesize chunks.

Tip 8 . Okay, heres some very useful plugins we use, Yoast is the King off SEO plug-ins, indicating with a traffic light system how well optimised each page of your website is. Google Analytics, of course to see your traffic & how visitors are using your site, Smush to optimise your photos. Easy Twitter Feed, to show your Tweets on your website