If you wish to build a website, then WordPress is a great choice to build it with! One of WordPress’s stand-out features is its content management system (CMS): Content can be added and edited very easily on a WP site, and the site’s design and layout can be changed quite easily as well. It also is the most popular web framework on the internet (powering 45% of the world’s web domains), so your WordPress skills will come in handy at several points in your life1. It might even land you a job in web development, design, or content marketing.
With that said, one of the shortcomings of the WordPress eco-systems is just the overload of Ads thrown at you — trying to sell you website-building services, plugins, and themes — if you search for anything related to “WordPress”. I don’t have to sell you any services, so here are some honest tips on getting started:
Learning the basics
These two links are more than enough to get started (don’t get into an endless tutorial hell):
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37GGkoPNeXE – How to make a WordPress website start to finish (1 hr 20 mins video)
- https://www.namecheap.com/wordpress/how-to-install-wordpress/ (5 mins read)
After you complete these, you would want to launch your website online, i.e. you will install WordPress on a web server2 and hook your domain name to it.
Hosting your website online (wordpress.org vs wordpress.com)
WordPress is free and open-source software that you can download from wordpress.org. “wordpress.com” is owned by a private company and provides commercial solutions to host WordPress websites. I find hosting on wordpress.com quite restrictive, and I think you’ll soon grow out of it if you choose it. It’s also costlier, and the company has been getting a bad rap3 for the last few years.
So, in most cases, it will be better if you learn to use WordPress on a separate web hosting platform (for example Hostinger, a2hosting, BlueHost, WPEngine).
Building websites on your personal computer
You can also install WordPress locally on your computer to play around with the settings and build advanced sites. You can build any number of throwaway sites on your local system (say build a photography blog, a portfolio site, a writer’s blog, a travel site etc)! Check this video guide for installing the local XAMPP server – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTNFZRdDotM
This website (nitinnain.com) has been running on WordPress for 10+ years now and WordPress has served me pretty well. I have even changed the site design thrice with very little effort. So Good luck with your project. Drop in a comment if you have questions.
1 If you are not technically inclined, then you can use Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, etc. However, these platforms usually cost upward of $10/month for even the most basic site.
2 A web server is simply a computer managed by some company where you host your website (They ensure power backup and internet connectivity to the server, so your website is accessible 24×7).
3 There have been some controversies in recent years around the ownership of WordPress. It’s a complex debate that you don’t need to worry about if you’re new. WordPress isn’t going anywhere.
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