Designing, Developing and Rolling out a new WordPress CMS Website – Part 1

There are many benefits to setting up your own self-hosted WordPress website.

We’ve covered installing a WordPress website before, plus we regularly provide useful WordPress advice.

This two part article covers advice for rolling out a new WordPress CMS website, as well as designing and developing the website.

There is fresh new content in these two articles we’ve not written about previously.

Plus we will be dealing with various problems WordPress developers and designers experience.

Note: This is to supplement our existing WordPress articles.

Hire Neogain

This two part guide doesn’t cover everything you need to know.

Plus let’s be frank, telling you how to do something, is vastly different to having the experience to successfully put together a great website.

Let Neogain, who have web designers and developers in Hull, be the business to save you time, by building your website.

For Hull website design and development, please hire Neogain.

Before you begin, you do need to review to the following articles:

• WordPress Development Environment• Installing and Configuring a WordPress Website

Without following those articles above, if you are a novice WordPress user, you will be lost, so please read those first.

This guide isn’t going to cover a well planned website build, as it is only a two part series, but please bare in mind areas such as branding, accessibility, disability access and other important areas should be addressed by yourself during your project.

The domain

Many people own a domain for a while, before purchasing hosting and setting up a website.

Well if your website will be going live in the next few days, now is the time to configure the domain and hosting.

If your domain is with one company, but your web hosting is elsewhere you need to update the domain records.

If you are planning on having the web hosting company deal with email as well as MySQL database, and web space, you need to change the name server records for the domain.

Then you need to visit your web hosts control panel and setup the new domain. It will probably take a couple of days for the changes to propagate around the internet.

The MySQL username and password

While we are covering the web host company, let us quickly touch upon the live website’s MySQL database. You should make sure both the username and password are not simple, but instead random characters over eight characters in length.

It is best you get your web hosting and MySQL ready ahead of time, so you have a smoother website roll-out.

Right back to the design……

Before you start designing your website you need to make sure you have looked at what your requirements are. There are many questions, some of which are:

If using advertisement where do I want to place the adverts?

How many columns do I need?

How do I brand my website and is there existing branding to consider?

If I have a telephone number, where should I place it?

Just a small selection of questions, but let’s look at these. Starting with advertisement, let’s presume you are going to use Google AdSense, which is a popular ad network.

Ad placements will vary based on the type of content, website theme and the type of adverts you use.

So for example you could place an ad unit link below your a top header area, a square advert at the top of the content aligned left or right, another in the widget area and perhaps another at the bottom of the page.

So what does this mean?

Now unless you plan on using small side bar adverts, you probably won’t want to narrow columns to the left or right.

It means a website theme with at least two columns is required, plus probably a top navigation area.

If you are branding the website, which is recommended, you should focus on the brand, rather than creating a new ‘personality’.

So with a typical brand you should expect a logo, slogan and accompanying house style comprising of colours, type of font and perhaps a layout consideration.

Next you need to consider whether you will be placing a phone number into the theme design.

Limited research shows that websites with telephone numbers, not just on a contact page, can increase sales rates.

So if you plan on using a slogan as well as a telephone number, the header area should be reasonably large in height to accommodate the logo, slogan and telephone number.

So going on the above, it could be a two column theme, with large header area and that is only the beginning of the design process. The point I’m trying to make is, don’t go searching for a theme and then try and make everything fit. Have your requirements already listed and then either hire someone to design a theme to that specification, else find a theme that matches or can be altered.

Three places to start when looking for a theme to modify:

http://blankthemes.com/

http://randyjensenonline.com/thoughts/handcrafted-wp-starter-theme/

http://themeshaper.com/thematic/

In part two of our article, we will be providing advice to consider when developing your website, plus answer a few common WordPress setup questions.

If you want to hire a Hull web design company,

please get in touch.