In this tutorial you will be learning how to build your website using WordPress. This tutorial will focus on using the SiteRubix.com website builder. this is a privately hostied website bulding tool that I personally use for all my websites. It uses a modified WordPress website platform. Of course you would need to join Wealthy Affiliate in order to take full advantage of the SiteRubix website builder.
* Choose a name for your site. (Don’t spend a lot of time here. You will more than likely change this later.)
* Add plugins. (Premium members only.)
* How to add a Theme.
* Create pages and posts.
* Manage your menu.
* Use widgets.
* Write Quality Content.
By the end of this tutorial you will have a quality website in place as a base on which to build and expand your business. Your website will be ready to optimize for the search engines.
Let’s choose a name for your website. No need to worry about picking just the right name at this point. You shouldn’t be concerned about that until you are ready to purchase your very own domain. The free SiteRubix site is a subdomain. Which is to say it is a website that was built on the platform of a primary domain, The SiteRubix domain.
When you purchase your own domain is the time to consider what your site name should be. Before you actually name your site, you will have to do a domain search to see if your choice is available. You may have to settle on a .org or .net site name or even your second or third choice of a website name. I’ve been down this road a time or two.
Once you are ready to purchase your own domain, you will want to either upgrade to a premium account, where you will have unlimited website hosting on private servers, or find a hosting site like Hostgator or Godaddy among many others.
With your own domain name, your site comes off as being more professional don’t you think? After all, how many people would have taken www.amazon.wordpress.com very seriously? That’s the website name of someone who is playing at being an online business. Not that of a multimillion dollar internet conglomerate!
Choose your site name with care! You want it to be easy to remember and very appealing! It could become the next ebay or amazon or bigsnap! OK I made that last one up. I think!? Chances are it is already taken. If not, go for it. You can remember me fondly and with a big paycheck when you hit it big!
OK now we choose our theme. If you haven’t upgraded to premium this is a very easy task. If you have upgraded, just search Google for the most popular WP themes and choose one. Themes have different settings and some themes will give your more flexibility than others. You will just have to play around with them until you find the one that’s right for you.
Adding plugins is a premium member only option. I will go ahead and explain it for when you do upgrade. There are many excellent plugins for WordPress users to take advantage of. But before we go all crazy installing tons of plugins you need to know that too many plugins and very complicated plugins can slow your site down. And you want your site to SNAP!
Your site will come with certain plugins preinstalled: Akismet – a spam filter plugin, All in One SEO – a search engine optimization plugin, Exclude Pages From Navigation – a plugin that will keep Google from crawling specified pages and SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – a spam guard capture system for forms and comments.
Broken Link Checker – lets you know if you have links that aren’t working, Quick Contact Form – for contact forms and other information gathering forms, Shareaholic – a social media share plugin, WordPress Ping Optimizer – self explanatory and WP Edit – a WYSIWYG editor toolbar to enhance the WP edit function.
Wow! We are ready to create some pages! OK then! Our first page we want to create will be our About Me or Hey This Is Me or what ever you want to call your Bio page. It will depend on what type of site you are going to have… casual business blog or professional website. This is where you tell your visitors a little about yourself. Let them know you on a first name basis. That’s always more friendly.
Just talk to them like you were wanting them to become your friend. Take a look around at other sites that yours will be similar to and see how other people are introducing themselves. This will give you plenty of examples.
Next create your contact page. this is where you will let your visitors know how they can contact you. If you are a big business and want people to be able to contact you by phone you will put that here. Also add your street address or PO Box if applicable. (once again only if you have the kind of business where you want people to find you.) But regardless of what type of business you are conducting, you will want to add your email and a contact form here.
Now for your Privacy Policy page. You will definitely want one of these for your site. Google likes it when sites have these. Don’t worry I’ve got you covered. Head on over to
Now that you have the base work done, it’s time to create some of your content pages. This will be all up to you as far as page names goes. It will be dependent upon what type of business you conduct, or what type of blog you are writing. Once again you can visit sites similar to yours to get ideas. But be sure that’s all you do is get ideas. You DO NOT want to copy what someone else has done! That is a big NONO with Google. They will penalize your site for it. OK let’s move along.
Menu management. This is simply arranging your pages within your menu. Getting your main pages out in front. Placing your subpages ion submenus and the like. You can even create more than one menu if you like. Quite a simple aspect.
Widgets! a simple to use but powerful aspect of your website. Not as powerful as the plugins but still very useful and highly visual. Widgets is a way of placing things in one place that will show up on every page of your site if you want it too. Widgets are a simple drag and drop tool to put them in place. I will go into a bit more detail in the over the shoulder walkthrough.
Now we come to the meat and potatoes of your website! Your content! This is where you need to capture your visitors attention and hold it throughout your page or post. And to entice them to visit other posts and/or pages of your site. If your writing skills aren’t that great, you can always pay someone for posts, this normally costs about $5 per page or post for decent quality. It is best for you to write your own content though.
Unique, quality content is what Google likes to see on websites. This plays a big part in how well your site ranks in the search engines. And you will need to write a lot of content when you are first starting out. One or two posts a day or more. continue to build on your existing pages and add more pages to your site. It all should be relevant to whatever your business or blog is about. Keep it simple, keep it relevant and keep it interesting!
Please feel free to tell me what you think. I would genuinely like to hear your opinion.
