.: WordPress as One of The Most Powerful Free Website Building Tools
By:heris
Category:Home / Internet / Web Design
Today, there are so many tools available which are mainly intended to help people create different types of website, from scripts for creating online directories to software for creating webpages based on the data from datafeeds.
WordPress is actually a blog software for someone who wants to create an online diary using her own domain name and hosting account. Many marketers have used it to boost the visibility of their products and services since the past few years. Futhermore, many of them have installed this script in the root directory of their hosting accounts and then customize their blogs so that the blogs will look like a normal website.
Here are the advantages of using blog software to build a website.
- Updated Content
Everytime a person creates a post, the homepage will also be automatically updated. This is because the last post will always be displayed on the homepage.
- Submission
Not like a normal website, a website that has the form of blog can be submitted to blog directories and blog search engines which is very useful to increase the number of backlinks as well as the number of direct visitors.
- Comments
Besides you can improve your produts or services through the feedback from your readers, the comments are also useful in adding fresh contents for your website.
- Syndication
Other webmasters will be able to display the contents of your website (your posts) on their own websites by using software like CaRP. This could increase the popularity of your website dramatically.
- Publication
You can announce your new tips, products or services to your frequent site visitors without having to create seperated publication.
Those are just some advantages you can gain by building a website with a blog software.
It is true that WordPress is not the only blog software that can be used for this purpose. But using this open-source script, you can find many tutorials about it easily which will be very useful to improve your website later. There are also many plugins you can use to add extra features for your WordPress blog. You can say that WordPress is one of the most powerful free website building tools.
Now, if you want to create a website with WordPress, there are several tips you can follow. Here, it is assumed that you are using the WordPress default theme.
First, upload all WordPress files and directories into the root directory of your hosting account. Then after opening the wp-config.php file and inserting your database information, visit yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php. Just read the readme.html file and follow the installation procedure.
After installing the script, you are ready to make some changes to the template files.
- Opening Sentences on Your Homepage
Usually, a normal website has one or two paragraph on its homepage that contains general information about it. In order to do it, click "Dashboard->Presentation->Theme Editor->Main Index Template" to access the index.php file and put the opening sentences in the file. You may also try to put the main title of your website above the opening sentences but notice that if you use <H1> tag the title may not be displayed "correctly". You may have to modify the style.css file to solve this problem.
- Display the Posts as Excerpts on Your Homepage
Still with the index.php file, to list your posts on the homepage in excerpt, find the "the_content" function and change it to "the_excerpt". You can do the same with the template file for categories by modifying archive.php file (Dashboard->Presentation->Theme Editor->Archives).
- The Title of Each Category
If "ADSL devices" is the name of a category, normally WordPress will present it like this: "Archive for the ADSL devices Category". If you only want to display "ADSL devices" as the title for that category, remove the words "Archive for the ..... Category".
- Header Image
To put your own image on the top of your website, save that image file as personalheader.jpg with 760px X 200px dimension. Then upload the file into the images directory (wp-content/themes/default/images). Finally, access the header.php file (Dashboard->Presentation->Theme Editor->Header) and remove the commenting signs (/* and */) that comment out "headerimg { background: url ....."
- Displaying Sidebar on Every Page
As default, WordPress doesn't put sidebar on several files (e.g. single.php). If you want to put it, you can implement these steps:
- Open the file (e.g. single.php) and change widecolumn to narrowcolumn.
- Then add the get_sidebar() function above the get_footer() function.
Those are just some basic modifications you can try in order to present your blog as a normal website. By visiting websites that provide tutorials about customizing WordPress templates, you will find many tips such as how to insert meta tags on every post, how to insert random excerpt below each of your post and so on that will be useful to improve the look and feel of your blog.
Now just keep creating new contents (posting) and start building backlinks to your website. If you keep up with it on a regular basis, you'll start reaping the rewards of building a website with WordPress.
Article keywords: free website building tools, build a website, building your own website
Article Source: http://www.articles32.com
Heris Yunora is the owner of UnlimitedHostingPlan.com, a website that contains the comparisons between two "unlimited web hosting" companies and also maintains a list of active Article Directories.
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