WordPress

If you are planning to create a WordPress website, but you are confused about how you should design it to follow the latest and the essential best practices for web design, then you’re in the right place. Designing a website is not a piece of cake if you need to make a website that stands out, but there are a few things that represent about 90% of creating a well designed and optimized website. Let’s explore these tips:   Use a Premium Theme Instead of A Free One To be honest: We all love free things! When it comes to WordPress themes, you’ll find hundreds of free themes. But if you plan to create a professional WordPress website, you’ll probably need to go with the premium options, Why? Because premium themes have a more flexible structure, better code quality, more performance-optimized, and more functionality that will help you produce a great design.   Use the Right Font Fonts play a crucial role when it comes to a good user-experience design. You should go with a font that is available and supported with most browsers, you’ll probably stick with Google Fonts. And be aware that, when you choose your fonts carefully, it will reflect the personality of your brand and make your website look more professional, trustworthy, and stand out in the competition.   Choose an Accent Color for Your Website All of us want to make our websites look “WOW”. So, it’s important to take your website’s colour selection seriously. Your website colours reflect your business message and your brand identity. As a beginner, you’ll probably go with your favourite colour, but you shouldn’t do that, instead, you should know what’s your business message that you want your colours to reflect, then based on the answer choose the right colours.   Performance Optimization is Important According to Google, 53% of users leave a mobile page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if you don’t care about your website speed, your visitors won’t care for you, too! Also, your website optimization plays a vital role in search engine optimization. If you want to invest some time and effort to boost your WordPress website optimization, you can take a look at our article that will show you 5 ways to speed up your WordPress website performance.   A Good Logo Matters! Your logo reflects your business identity for sure. It shows the values and ideas behind your brand. You should consider some main factors when it comes to logo design which are readability, simplicity, and uniqueness. Your logo is one of the most important cornerstones of your business, so pick a good designer and don’t go with the cheapest options, because it really matters!   Final Notes After going through the main design concepts to follow the web design’s best practices, the best advice we could give you is to keep learning about the design and user experience because it really matters to make your WordPress website stand out from the competition. From choosing a high-quality theme, good fonts, setting accent colours and making a good logo, all of these are key points to help you create an exceptional website design.

Having a professional portfolio is a must, especially if you’re a freelancer. You need a professional portfolio to showcase your work, leave a good professional-looking impression to your target audience – employers, companies – who are looking for you, to better market yourself and to stand out among all of your competitors! The surprise here is creating a professional-looking portfolio with WordPress is super easy. Note – WordPress is the best solution for freelancers who are looking to make a professional online presence because it has everything you’ll need from the ease of use, great themes, and plenty of additional functionality through hundreds of plugins, by the way, if you are still asking yourself why you should use WordPress you can read our detailed answer for this question to really understand this point. By following up with this article, we’ll take you from the very first step such as web hosting to creating a simple but elegant portfolio WordPress website. when you finish this article you will know how to create a portfolio website in WordPress.   Choose a reliable WordPress Host: we’ve discussed the performance of WordPress topic to death in the past, but here are the most important three things you’ll need to keep in mind when choosing a WordPress host: [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] 1. Scalability: Your host should have many plans with scalability in mind to handle demanding websites, in case you want to make new projects in the future. 2. Security: A reliable, good host should take web security as a serious matter, and offer features to help you keep your website safe such as SSL certificates, backup options, etc., you can learn WordPress security best practices from here. 3. Support:  This is so important, in case anything went wrong with your website, you’ll want to have access to a reliable support team with a rapid response. After you chose a reliable hosting provider and purchased a shared hosting plan, let’s now move onto installing WordPress.   Install WordPress: This step might look a bit different from a web host to another, but the basic steps remain the same. After purchasing a hosting plan, you’ll have access to a private cPanel which is a control panel to manage your hosting environment. It will have a one-click app installing section – also called “Softaculous Apps Installer” – for installing WordPress and many other CMSs. Find the WordPress option in this section, then install it.   Install the right theme and plugins: This step is a bit more open than the rest of this guide because everyone has his own needs, but there are some factors on how to choose a perfect theme for your WordPress website: Choose a clean, creative, professional-looking theme. Your theme shouldn’t be overwhelming and have tons of colors and animations, just choose a clean but creative one that reflects your nature, personality to help attract your visitors’ looks without exaggeration. Choose an SEO-Optimized theme to help you make your website search engine friendly. Choose a performance-optimized theme, built carefully to give your website a short loading time and a great user experience. If you want to learn more about WordPress plugins, you can read our guide to WordPress plugins from here.   Start Building Your Website: Now you have WordPress installed with a good, professional-looking theme. Now it’s time to create your portfolio page/s and content. Let’s get started. [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] Your Portfolio Basic Structure: Header: A good header should have a clean/creative background that reflects your desired needs, and an attractive carefully-crafted title that tells your visitors more about you! Main Content: You can split your portfolio main content into three parts which are: Project Gallery:  This part is the heart and soul of your portfolio website, with a link attached to each project. About Me Section:  By now you have made a lot of progress with your portfolio, but you still need to tell your visitors more about yourself and provide them with some insights about who you are and what’s your abilities and skills. Contact Form: After you perfectly showcased yourself and work to your visitors, it’s time to get them to contact you. The basic contact form should have three main entries which are Name, Email, and Message. Footer: Here you have many options such as you could put your social media links, or if you have a blog or additional pages on your website you could put them in your website footer.   Final Notes A good, professional-looking portfolio on WordPress can open a lot of doors to gain more potential employers, because it provides them with a good idea of your abilities and skills, and enables you to stand out from your competitors. And the process of creating your portfolio with WordPress is fairly easy as you saw, even if it will take some time, but it’s definitely worth it.

What is WordPress? WordPress is an open-source (CMS) content management system that enables you to easily create and manage a website without being a web developer. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, used by millions of people including business owners, bloggers, publishers, individuals, and more to maintain their online presence every day. WordPress is simply a piece of software built to make it easy for individuals without technical knowledge to create their websites easily from a simple dashboard. You can create new website pages, blog posts, edit your website appearance, and more with a few clicks. WordPress is free to use. There are no setup fees to have WordPress information, with thousands of themes available to create amazing-looking websites. It’s one of the best ways for businesses and individuals to create fully customized websites. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. It’s powering 63% of the worlds’ websites whose content management system – CMS.   What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?   When you search the word ‘WordPress’, you will find two different websites, WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Let’s find out what is the difference between them: WordPress.org also called self-hosted WordPress among the people, is the free, open-source WordPress software that you can install on your web hosting server to create a website on your domain with it, 100% free. WordPress.com is a paid service made for profit, powered by the WordPress organization, It is also simple to use, but you may lose some of the flexibility of the open-source self-hosted version of WordPress. If you want to truly own your website, the open-source self-hosted WordPress version is the best option for you. In most times, when people say “WordPress” they mean the self-hosted version that’s available on WordPress.org or that you’ll find on your cPanel for example. All you need to get started with the free open-source self-hosted most used WordPress version is to purchase a web hosting plan and a domain name, after that you will be a few clicks and a few seconds to put your WordPress website online.   A Brief History of WordPress WordPress is open-source software,  WordPress was first created back in 2003 as a previous project called b2/cafe log, as WordPress is open-source software which means it’s made by a large community of contributors. But if we want to know the first start of WordPress from its roots, it was originally created due to a collaboration between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since that, Matt Mullenweg has become the face of the WordPress organization, and he is the founder of Automattic which is the company behind the for-profit WordPress.com service as we mentioned.   What Kind of Websites can you create with WordPress? Years ago, WordPress was primarily created as a tool for creating a blog, not traditional websites, but all of that changed due to the changes in its core code. Thanks to the WordPress’s massive ecosystem of themes, plugins, widgets, and more, you can now build any type of website with WordPress with that great ecosystem. For example, you can create with WordPress: Business Websites Portfolio Websites Blogs eCommerce Websites Forums eLearning Websites Galleries Q&A Websites Social Networks Membership Websites Resumes Websites Presentational Websites Almost any type of website you can dream up with…   Who Uses WordPress? WordPress powers 35% of all websites on the internet as we mentioned, and all business types from small companies to corporations, individuals, and everyone else in between. Also, as a note, we use WordPress! So, all of our blog that you’re looking at right now is powered by WordPress. A lot of other well-known organizations use WordPress. Here are some of them: Whitehouse.gov Microsoft Blog BBC America cPanel Blog The New York Times Mercedes-Benz And More…   Why Should You Use WordPress? There are many reasons to use WordPress, but here are the biggest: WordPress is Open Source and Free One of the most important benefits of WordPress is that it’s open-source, free software, even if you need to pair it with a little amount of money for web hosting. Still, you will never have to pay for using WordPress, and as it’s open-source software, so you’ll find a lot of open-source plugins and themes to change how your website looks and functions. WordPress is Easy to Install If you think you need to be a tech genius or to be an experienced web developer to create your own website! Well, then think again! As you can with a couple of clicks install WordPress on your site. WordPress is Customizable Even if you are not a web developer or don’t have a web developer in your team, you will be able to easily edit and create a 100% customized website thanks to WordPress’s massive ecosystem of themes and plugins. Themes are the primary look of your website. Plugins are how your website functions, for example, a contact form, SEO helper plugin, and more. There are thousands of WordPress themes and plugins, so you have thousands of choices to make a fully customized functioning website on your own with a few clicks thanks to the great massive WordPress ecosystem! Easy to Find Help with WordPress Because of WordPress’s popularity, it’s very easy to find help with it if you ever got stuck in anything. There are many types of help blogs, tutorials, forums, groups, developers, videos, and more. So, what will you build with WordPress? We can’t wait to find out!  Congratulations you have passed the first step to be a WordPress expert.