- Apr 25, 2011
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Who is this guide for?
This guide is for anyone that is planning on setting up a website for the first time. This could be a website to promote your business, an amazon affiliate website or an adsense website; the same guide applies regardless.
The aim of this guide is to help anyone that falls into the above category to build a website from the ground up with minimal (if any) technical skills whilst insuring that everything has been done the right way to allow for future expansion as your website grows.
You might be thinking to yourself now that you don’t need a guide for that; you can use one of those free website builders such as Wix or Wordpress.com right? Well yes, you can do that and in fact that is something that lots of other business owners have done in the past.
These types of “build your own website for free” services do have their benefits – they make it super easy to get a website up and running with zero budget and zero technical skills. You can also use them to get a website online fast.
However, there are several problems with most of these sites:
The first problem is that you are generally very limited in what you can create on these sites. I have seem business owners time and time again coming to me saying they have this website running on Wix, or GoDaddy or 1and1 and it wont do this, or it wont do that, or they need to improve the SEO – the list goes on. The problem is, I tell them, those options are simply not available. These website builders have been designed to build very specific, and restricted, websites and the advanced functionality that you are looking for beyond that simply is not there.
The second problem is that you end up being locked into that platform. This is something else that I have seem time and time again; once you build your website, add all of your content and get your site indexed in the search engines, that’s it; you are stuck.
It is very difficult to move away from these companies further down the line. So when it comes to your business expanding and you decide that you have outgrown the free “build it yourself” website, you find that it is near impossible to move to a new platform without basically leaving everything behind and starting from scratch.
Why is this guide different?
In this guide I am going to show you, step by step, how you can build a professional website, by yourself and without any technical knowledge required.
This site will be self-hosted (Meaning you have 100% full control and ownership of it) and it will be built on the most popular website platform that exists on the Internet today – WordPress. And this is not the same as WordPress.com where your files are hosted by someone else and you have restricted access to a ready-made online platform. No, this is the self-hosted version of WordPress where you set up your own hosting account, install the WordPress files into your account and also where you have full control over every aspect of your site.
What’s so good about WordPress?
37% of the web is built on WordPress.
The good thing about this, if I didn’t already make it clear, is that you have ownership and control over everything; so nobody is going to hold anything over you, even if you decide to pick up and move everything away to a new registrar, or a new hosting provider or even an alternative platform.
Secondly, because the website is being built on a self-hosted version of WordPress it gives you far greater control over the site and with this control comes huge flexibility. If you want to completely change the design of your site, you can do that. If you want to add ecommerce functionality, you can easily do that as well (And importantly, without being tied into a never-ending monthly subscription for the pleasure).
Lastly, and this is also a fairly important one; if at some point you decide that you want to have your website designed professionally, then you can easily take whatever site you have built, all of your existing content, your established rankings within Google and other search engines and hand it directly over to a website designer. Thanks to WordPress, any decent website designer will be able to put together a professional, bespoke design and plug it straight on top of whatever you currently have in place.
What is the scope of this guide?
Before we get started, just a quick heads up on the scope of this guide. This document has been put together as a full step by step guide for building your own website. The guide covers it all, from start to finish. Everything from ordering your domain name to setting up your own web hosting account right through to designing and publishing your fully functioning business website.
Registering a domain name
You may already have a domain name. In fact, if you are already operating a business then you probably have email set up and the chances are that you have your own custom email address for your business – for example, [email protected]. If that is the case, then you can skip the domain registration as you will be making use of your existing domain name.
However, if you do not currently have a domain name then you will need one. So, the first step is to head over to a domain registrar and set up a domain.
For this guide we will be using 123-reg as the domain provider. Visit https://www.123-reg.co.uk/ to get started.
Account Registration
First, click on the account icon at the top righthand corner of the website and then select “Sign-up”.
Fill in your email address and choose a password.
Fill in the contact details for you and your company.
Confirm whether you want to be contacted by 123-reg in future.
Once you have completed the registration process you will be taken back to the homepage of 123-reg. Once you get here, its time to purchase your domain name,
You can enter in any domain name into the search box to see if it is available.
If you are happy with the domain choice, click on “add to basket”. Once you have added the domain into your basket, click on the basket icon at the top righthand corner of the site in order to proceed to the checkout.
You can ignore any offers that 123-reg present you with and instead opt to continue with the purchase. For the record, although 123-reg also offer hosting, we will be hosting the website with another provider. This is good practice as it keeps your domain name and the actual website separate from each other.
This acts as a form of redundancy and means that even if the hosting provider went down for some reason, you still have complete control over your domain and as long as you have website backups (More on that later) you can easily point your domain to a new hosting provider and carry on without any disruption.
Follow the prompts to check out securely.
Fill in all the required information.
Click on “place order” via either the card or PayPal payment links, depending which method of payment you prefer.
Congratulations, you now have a domain name. We will come back to the domain registration control panel later, but for now we are finished with the domain and we’ll be moving on to the hosting.
If you already have a domain name, then this is where you should pick up the guide.
Setting up website hosting
The next step is to set up website hosting. The website hosting is where you store the actual website files. Every time somebody visits your website, they are effectively downloading it from the website host, so it is a very important component of your overall website setup.
The important things to look for in a website host are:
So, in order to get the hosting set up, head over to the Guru website - https://www.guru.co.uk/
Click on the “Login” button at the top righthand corner of the website; although you do not currently have an account, this is how we get to the registration screen.
Next, click on the “order now” button to be taken to the new accounts and hosting page.
On this page, you will see several different packages that are available. Packages range from basic hosting to hosting and email combos and at the top level, professional shared hosting plans.
For the record, there are also lots of other packages such as dedicated servers which are suitable if you run a large ecommerce site with lots of traffic, or if you have multiple large-scale websites.
However, for now we are just going to select the basic hosting package – shared hosting, at £4.99 per month. If you need to upgrade your package later, then you can do so very easily and the support team from Guru will even transfer everything over for you.
It is worth noting though that the basic shared hosting plan is more than adequate for handling most startup websites.
To get started, click on “order now” below the shared hosting plan.
At the next screen you will see options for choosing your domain name. As you already have a domain name purchased via 123-reg, you can leave the default option selected (I WILL USE MY EXISTING DOMAIN AND UPDATE MY NAMESERVERS) and enter your domain name and extension as directed, then click on “use”.
The next screen is where we can configure the shared hosting options. You can leave the billing cycle as monthly, or select a yearly option depending on which you prefer. All the other options can stay at their defaults.
Check and confirm that you are happy with the pricing details, then click on “Continue”.
At the next screen, you have the option to enter a promo code – at the time of writing, the code “2020” works and this will reduce the first month to just £1+VAT.
To complete the purchasing of your hosting package, click on “Checkout”.
At the next screen, enter all your company information, select a preferred payment method, click the terms of service agreement checkbox, and then press “Complete order”.
You will then be redirected to the invoice page where you can click on the “pay now” button to complete the purchase.
Enter your card details, tick the “remember my payment details” box, click on the “I’m not a robot” tick box and then select “Make Payment”.
If you made it to the “Successful payment” screen, then you now have a hosting account with Guru, congratulations.
After a few seconds you should be redirected back to the guru website, where you will see a button labelled “continue to client area”. Click on that button and you will be taken to the guru client area.
Once in the client area, click on “Services” and you will be taken to a list of your services, which currently should be only the shared hosting account that you just purchased. You may see the status “Pending” initially, as it takes a little while for the hosting account to be fully set up and verified.
Do not worry, once the account has been set up and is ready to use, you will receive an email confirming the same. Let us wait for that email to arrive, then we can continue with the setup process.
Connecting the domain to your hosting account
Once you have received the confirmation email from Guru, your hosting account is ready to use. The next step is to connect the domain, that we purchased in the first step, to the hosting account.
First, let’s look through the welcome email as it contains some useful information. The key pieces of information in that email that you want to make a note of are as follows –
Go back to our domain registrar (123-reg) by clicking on this link - https://www.123-reg.co.uk/
Click on “Control panel” at the top of the page. If prompted, enter the login information from when we set up the 123-reg account – this will consist of your registered email address and your chosen password.
Once you are logged in, click on “Manage” from the homepage.
If you already have a domain name and it is registered with a company other than 123-reg, then you will need to look at their help information, or contact their support team, in order to find the nameservers or DNS settings location.
Important note: as we are setting up a new domain, without any existing email services attached to it, we will be updating the nameservers so that all the domain’s services are managed by Guru hosting. However, if you already have a domain name, and especially if you have email services attached to the domain, then you will need to change only the A record for the domain in the DNS settings of your registrar, you can update the A record to point to the hosting IP address (which is also included in the welcome email from Guru hosting). This will prevent your email services from being interrupted.
However, for this guide, lets assume you have purchased a new domain from 123-reg and there are no email services running on it. In this case, we will want to update the nameservers to point to our Guru hosting account.
On the manage domain page of 123-reg, click on “Change nameservers (DNS)”.
On the nameserver management page, enter the two nameservers from the Guru Hosting email, putting one nameserver in each of the provided boxes, then click on “update”.
You should see a message that reads “Success! Nameservers successfully updated.”.
This means we have successfully updated the domain name so that it points to the Guru hosting account that we purchased and set up in the previous step.
At this point we need to wait a couple of hours so that these changes can propagate across the internet.
Installing the WordPress Application
Once the changes have propagated, it is time to install the WordPress application on our hosting account. After this step you will have a working (albeit very empty) website.
For this part of the guide we need to log in to the hosting portal for the first time. Look back to the welcome email and copy the Control Panel URL. this will be something along the lines of https://hostname.guru.net.uk/cpanel
Alternatively, you can also use your domain name, followed by a forward slash and then the word “cPanel”. For example, http://your-website.com/cpanel
Once this page loads up, log in with the account username and password from the Guru Hosting welcome email, then click on “Log In”.
Once logged in you will see lots of different features, links, and options. However, do not be overwhelmed as we are only going to be using a few of these features for now.
The first thing we are going to do is to set up an SSL certificate; this will make the website secure and it will prevent security warnings once we get further on in the build process.
Scroll down to the section labelled “Security” and then click on “SSL/TLS Status”.
On the SSL/TLS status page, click on “Run AutoSSL”. You will see this button changes to read “AutoSSL In Progress”. Wait for this process to finish.
If the AutoSSL process was successful you should see “AutoSSL Domain validated” next to your domain name(s).
At this point you can click on the home screen icon which is the 9 boxes at the top left corner of the page.
The second thing we are going to do is install the WordPress application. For this, scroll down to the section labelled “Guru web applications” and click on “WordPress”.
Once you arrive at the WordPress installation page, click on “Install this application”.
There are quite a few options on this page, we are going to leave most of them as default, but we will customise a one of them.
Click on the domain dropdown box and select the version of your domain that has “https” at the beginning. This means we will be using the secure SSL certificate that we set up just a moment ago.
We can leave all the remaining options as their default values. The only thing we need to do is make a note of the WordPress username and password as this is what we will use to log in to the WordPress dashboard. Scroll down and click on “Install”.
At the next screen, we see a confirmation that the WordPress application has now been installed. To visit the dashboard, click on the link that ends in “wp-admin”. Make a note of this URL as well because this is what you will use whenever you are updating your website.
If you click on the link directly from the installation window then you will be automatically logged in to WordPress, but remember that if you visit this link in future, you will need to have your WordPress username and password (from above) to hand in order to log in.
Now you are in the WordPress dashboard. Take some time to look around and get familiar with this interface as you will be seeing it a lot. This is the administration area for WordPress and it is where you can not only design and build your website but also where you can update the content, write and publish blogposts as well as carrying out many other day to day website administration tasks.
Now we have a domain name, website hosting and a very basic website, powered by WordPress.
Installing a theme
The next step is making the website look a little nicer than it does with the basic (and default) WordPress theme installed.
If you click on "Appearance" and then "Themes" from within the WordPress dashboard, you can find a number of free WordPress themes that may suit your needs. However, if you want to build a decent looking website then its much better to go for a premium theme. For ease of use coupled with custom designs and advanced features, one of the best places to find the perfect theme is https://themeforest.net/.
Once on the themeforest website click on web themes and templates and then just below that, click on the "Wordpress" filter to show only themes that are built for use with WordPress.
You can look through this list and find your desired theme. It is generally better to pick the higher value themes - typically around $59 - as they normally have more features such as visual content editors, slider wizards and other premium plugins.
Once you find the theme that you want to use you can pay for the theme and then download the files. When downloading, select "all files and documentation" as this will provide you with the theme installation files as well as the documentation for setting up and customizing the theme.
Once you have downloaded the theme files you need to extract the folder. Inside of the primary folder you will see the documentation folder as well as a further zip file for the theme files themselves - extract this file and navigate to the theme files themselves - if you are in the right place you should see folders including css, functions, images and includes among others. The folder (Typically named after the theme itself) that contains these files is the one that you will need to upload to your websites home directory.
In order to upload the theme to your website you will need an FTP client (Although there is a facility within WordPress for uploading theme files it doesnt always work that well, depending on the overall size of the theme, so we will do this via FTP instead.
Download your prefered FTP client; in this case we will be using Filezilla, which you can download here - https://filezilla-project.org/
Install and then open Filezilla and once the program is open we can add in the details for the website - to do this, click on File, site manager. Click on New Site and then add in the website address along with the cpanel username and password, then click on connect.
Once you are connected, navigate to your websites themes folder on the righthand panel - typically this will be located under public_html/wp-content/themes.
This is where you want to upload the theme folder that we downloaded in the previous step. After uploading, you should see a folder named after your purchased theme in this directory and inside of that folder you should see the folder structured detailed above (css, functions, images, includes etc).
Now its time to activate the theme - to do this, go back to the wordpress dashboard, click on appearance, themes and then click on "Activate" below your purchased theme.
Customizing your website via the wordpress theme
Once the theme is installed, it will look a little broken, this is because most themes have some setup procedure that has to be followed in order for the theme to work properly. This includes plugin installation, menu creation and other important tasks such as the addition of your logo.
To make this as easy as possible, almost all themes downloaded from theme forest come with their own documentation and setup guide - if you go back to the original file that we downloaded from theme forest and extracted, you should see a documentation folder. In here you will have a full documentation pack that you can open - this normally opens like a website and provides you with lots of information organised into headings. Follow the installation and setup part of this guide in order to get your theme running as planned.
There is normally an option in there as well that involves importing demo content for the theme and the end result of this is a website that looks pretty much like the demo site your saw when you were purchasing the theme. Once you get your website to this point you can customize it further to suit your needs by stripping out any of the demo content that you don't need and then customising the rest in terms of adding your own wording and graphics.
The end result
By this point you should have a fully working website, with your own custom domain name, your own hosting package and a wordpress installation that not only looks great but one that you are in full control of. Although you might start with a fairly basic site, this gives you the ability to expand the site as far as you can imagine including the addition of content, images, plugins, connectivity with other third party services and basically anything else your website might need as it grows in size.
The best part is, you have done all of this without really needing to learn any coding, without having to have any amazing design skills but you still have a privately owned website that is not reliant on any "build your own site" type of service where you are locked in for all eternity.
This guide is for anyone that is planning on setting up a website for the first time. This could be a website to promote your business, an amazon affiliate website or an adsense website; the same guide applies regardless.
The aim of this guide is to help anyone that falls into the above category to build a website from the ground up with minimal (if any) technical skills whilst insuring that everything has been done the right way to allow for future expansion as your website grows.
You might be thinking to yourself now that you don’t need a guide for that; you can use one of those free website builders such as Wix or Wordpress.com right? Well yes, you can do that and in fact that is something that lots of other business owners have done in the past.
These types of “build your own website for free” services do have their benefits – they make it super easy to get a website up and running with zero budget and zero technical skills. You can also use them to get a website online fast.
However, there are several problems with most of these sites:
The first problem is that you are generally very limited in what you can create on these sites. I have seem business owners time and time again coming to me saying they have this website running on Wix, or GoDaddy or 1and1 and it wont do this, or it wont do that, or they need to improve the SEO – the list goes on. The problem is, I tell them, those options are simply not available. These website builders have been designed to build very specific, and restricted, websites and the advanced functionality that you are looking for beyond that simply is not there.
The second problem is that you end up being locked into that platform. This is something else that I have seem time and time again; once you build your website, add all of your content and get your site indexed in the search engines, that’s it; you are stuck.
It is very difficult to move away from these companies further down the line. So when it comes to your business expanding and you decide that you have outgrown the free “build it yourself” website, you find that it is near impossible to move to a new platform without basically leaving everything behind and starting from scratch.
Why is this guide different?
In this guide I am going to show you, step by step, how you can build a professional website, by yourself and without any technical knowledge required.
This site will be self-hosted (Meaning you have 100% full control and ownership of it) and it will be built on the most popular website platform that exists on the Internet today – WordPress. And this is not the same as WordPress.com where your files are hosted by someone else and you have restricted access to a ready-made online platform. No, this is the self-hosted version of WordPress where you set up your own hosting account, install the WordPress files into your account and also where you have full control over every aspect of your site.
What’s so good about WordPress?
37% of the web is built on WordPress.
The good thing about this, if I didn’t already make it clear, is that you have ownership and control over everything; so nobody is going to hold anything over you, even if you decide to pick up and move everything away to a new registrar, or a new hosting provider or even an alternative platform.
Secondly, because the website is being built on a self-hosted version of WordPress it gives you far greater control over the site and with this control comes huge flexibility. If you want to completely change the design of your site, you can do that. If you want to add ecommerce functionality, you can easily do that as well (And importantly, without being tied into a never-ending monthly subscription for the pleasure).
Lastly, and this is also a fairly important one; if at some point you decide that you want to have your website designed professionally, then you can easily take whatever site you have built, all of your existing content, your established rankings within Google and other search engines and hand it directly over to a website designer. Thanks to WordPress, any decent website designer will be able to put together a professional, bespoke design and plug it straight on top of whatever you currently have in place.
What is the scope of this guide?
Before we get started, just a quick heads up on the scope of this guide. This document has been put together as a full step by step guide for building your own website. The guide covers it all, from start to finish. Everything from ordering your domain name to setting up your own web hosting account right through to designing and publishing your fully functioning business website.
Registering a domain name
You may already have a domain name. In fact, if you are already operating a business then you probably have email set up and the chances are that you have your own custom email address for your business – for example, [email protected]. If that is the case, then you can skip the domain registration as you will be making use of your existing domain name.
However, if you do not currently have a domain name then you will need one. So, the first step is to head over to a domain registrar and set up a domain.
For this guide we will be using 123-reg as the domain provider. Visit https://www.123-reg.co.uk/ to get started.
Account Registration
First, click on the account icon at the top righthand corner of the website and then select “Sign-up”.
Fill in your email address and choose a password.
Fill in the contact details for you and your company.
Confirm whether you want to be contacted by 123-reg in future.
Once you have completed the registration process you will be taken back to the homepage of 123-reg. Once you get here, its time to purchase your domain name,
You can enter in any domain name into the search box to see if it is available.
If you are happy with the domain choice, click on “add to basket”. Once you have added the domain into your basket, click on the basket icon at the top righthand corner of the site in order to proceed to the checkout.
You can ignore any offers that 123-reg present you with and instead opt to continue with the purchase. For the record, although 123-reg also offer hosting, we will be hosting the website with another provider. This is good practice as it keeps your domain name and the actual website separate from each other.
This acts as a form of redundancy and means that even if the hosting provider went down for some reason, you still have complete control over your domain and as long as you have website backups (More on that later) you can easily point your domain to a new hosting provider and carry on without any disruption.
Follow the prompts to check out securely.
Fill in all the required information.
Click on “place order” via either the card or PayPal payment links, depending which method of payment you prefer.
Congratulations, you now have a domain name. We will come back to the domain registration control panel later, but for now we are finished with the domain and we’ll be moving on to the hosting.
If you already have a domain name, then this is where you should pick up the guide.
Setting up website hosting
The next step is to set up website hosting. The website hosting is where you store the actual website files. Every time somebody visits your website, they are effectively downloading it from the website host, so it is a very important component of your overall website setup.
The important things to look for in a website host are:
- Speed – as you want your website to load as fast as possible.
- Reliability – you want to best uptime possible as you do not ever want your website to be down and inaccessible.
- Backups – Ideally you want a hosting provider that provides regular backups for your website just in case there are any issues and you need to restore any part of the site.
- Support – there are occasionally times when you need help from the website host and in these rare situations its good to know that the level of support is up to standard.
So, in order to get the hosting set up, head over to the Guru website - https://www.guru.co.uk/
Click on the “Login” button at the top righthand corner of the website; although you do not currently have an account, this is how we get to the registration screen.
Next, click on the “order now” button to be taken to the new accounts and hosting page.
On this page, you will see several different packages that are available. Packages range from basic hosting to hosting and email combos and at the top level, professional shared hosting plans.
For the record, there are also lots of other packages such as dedicated servers which are suitable if you run a large ecommerce site with lots of traffic, or if you have multiple large-scale websites.
However, for now we are just going to select the basic hosting package – shared hosting, at £4.99 per month. If you need to upgrade your package later, then you can do so very easily and the support team from Guru will even transfer everything over for you.
It is worth noting though that the basic shared hosting plan is more than adequate for handling most startup websites.
To get started, click on “order now” below the shared hosting plan.
At the next screen you will see options for choosing your domain name. As you already have a domain name purchased via 123-reg, you can leave the default option selected (I WILL USE MY EXISTING DOMAIN AND UPDATE MY NAMESERVERS) and enter your domain name and extension as directed, then click on “use”.
The next screen is where we can configure the shared hosting options. You can leave the billing cycle as monthly, or select a yearly option depending on which you prefer. All the other options can stay at their defaults.
Check and confirm that you are happy with the pricing details, then click on “Continue”.
At the next screen, you have the option to enter a promo code – at the time of writing, the code “2020” works and this will reduce the first month to just £1+VAT.
To complete the purchasing of your hosting package, click on “Checkout”.
At the next screen, enter all your company information, select a preferred payment method, click the terms of service agreement checkbox, and then press “Complete order”.
You will then be redirected to the invoice page where you can click on the “pay now” button to complete the purchase.
Enter your card details, tick the “remember my payment details” box, click on the “I’m not a robot” tick box and then select “Make Payment”.
If you made it to the “Successful payment” screen, then you now have a hosting account with Guru, congratulations.
After a few seconds you should be redirected back to the guru website, where you will see a button labelled “continue to client area”. Click on that button and you will be taken to the guru client area.
Once in the client area, click on “Services” and you will be taken to a list of your services, which currently should be only the shared hosting account that you just purchased. You may see the status “Pending” initially, as it takes a little while for the hosting account to be fully set up and verified.
Do not worry, once the account has been set up and is ready to use, you will receive an email confirming the same. Let us wait for that email to arrive, then we can continue with the setup process.
Connecting the domain to your hosting account
Once you have received the confirmation email from Guru, your hosting account is ready to use. The next step is to connect the domain, that we purchased in the first step, to the hosting account.
First, let’s look through the welcome email as it contains some useful information. The key pieces of information in that email that you want to make a note of are as follows –
- Customer Portal – this is the address that you can use to log in to your Guru control panel. This is where you can change your hosting package, update your contact and billing details and so on.
- Account Username – This is the username for your new hosting account.
- Account Password – This is the password for your new hosting account.
- Control Panel URL – this is where you can administer your hosting account, and this is where your website resides.
- FTP Hostname – we will need this later when we upload files to the website.
- Nameserver 1 – This is the primary nameserver for your hosting account – we will need this when we connect the domain name to the hosting account.
- Nameserver 2 – this is the secondary nameserver and we will also need this shortly.
Go back to our domain registrar (123-reg) by clicking on this link - https://www.123-reg.co.uk/
Click on “Control panel” at the top of the page. If prompted, enter the login information from when we set up the 123-reg account – this will consist of your registered email address and your chosen password.
Once you are logged in, click on “Manage” from the homepage.
If you already have a domain name and it is registered with a company other than 123-reg, then you will need to look at their help information, or contact their support team, in order to find the nameservers or DNS settings location.
Important note: as we are setting up a new domain, without any existing email services attached to it, we will be updating the nameservers so that all the domain’s services are managed by Guru hosting. However, if you already have a domain name, and especially if you have email services attached to the domain, then you will need to change only the A record for the domain in the DNS settings of your registrar, you can update the A record to point to the hosting IP address (which is also included in the welcome email from Guru hosting). This will prevent your email services from being interrupted.
However, for this guide, lets assume you have purchased a new domain from 123-reg and there are no email services running on it. In this case, we will want to update the nameservers to point to our Guru hosting account.
On the manage domain page of 123-reg, click on “Change nameservers (DNS)”.
On the nameserver management page, enter the two nameservers from the Guru Hosting email, putting one nameserver in each of the provided boxes, then click on “update”.
You should see a message that reads “Success! Nameservers successfully updated.”.
This means we have successfully updated the domain name so that it points to the Guru hosting account that we purchased and set up in the previous step.
At this point we need to wait a couple of hours so that these changes can propagate across the internet.
Installing the WordPress Application
Once the changes have propagated, it is time to install the WordPress application on our hosting account. After this step you will have a working (albeit very empty) website.
For this part of the guide we need to log in to the hosting portal for the first time. Look back to the welcome email and copy the Control Panel URL. this will be something along the lines of https://hostname.guru.net.uk/cpanel
Alternatively, you can also use your domain name, followed by a forward slash and then the word “cPanel”. For example, http://your-website.com/cpanel
Once this page loads up, log in with the account username and password from the Guru Hosting welcome email, then click on “Log In”.
Once logged in you will see lots of different features, links, and options. However, do not be overwhelmed as we are only going to be using a few of these features for now.
The first thing we are going to do is to set up an SSL certificate; this will make the website secure and it will prevent security warnings once we get further on in the build process.
Scroll down to the section labelled “Security” and then click on “SSL/TLS Status”.
On the SSL/TLS status page, click on “Run AutoSSL”. You will see this button changes to read “AutoSSL In Progress”. Wait for this process to finish.
If the AutoSSL process was successful you should see “AutoSSL Domain validated” next to your domain name(s).
At this point you can click on the home screen icon which is the 9 boxes at the top left corner of the page.
The second thing we are going to do is install the WordPress application. For this, scroll down to the section labelled “Guru web applications” and click on “WordPress”.
Once you arrive at the WordPress installation page, click on “Install this application”.
There are quite a few options on this page, we are going to leave most of them as default, but we will customise a one of them.
Click on the domain dropdown box and select the version of your domain that has “https” at the beginning. This means we will be using the secure SSL certificate that we set up just a moment ago.
We can leave all the remaining options as their default values. The only thing we need to do is make a note of the WordPress username and password as this is what we will use to log in to the WordPress dashboard. Scroll down and click on “Install”.
At the next screen, we see a confirmation that the WordPress application has now been installed. To visit the dashboard, click on the link that ends in “wp-admin”. Make a note of this URL as well because this is what you will use whenever you are updating your website.
If you click on the link directly from the installation window then you will be automatically logged in to WordPress, but remember that if you visit this link in future, you will need to have your WordPress username and password (from above) to hand in order to log in.
Now you are in the WordPress dashboard. Take some time to look around and get familiar with this interface as you will be seeing it a lot. This is the administration area for WordPress and it is where you can not only design and build your website but also where you can update the content, write and publish blogposts as well as carrying out many other day to day website administration tasks.
Now we have a domain name, website hosting and a very basic website, powered by WordPress.
Installing a theme
The next step is making the website look a little nicer than it does with the basic (and default) WordPress theme installed.
If you click on "Appearance" and then "Themes" from within the WordPress dashboard, you can find a number of free WordPress themes that may suit your needs. However, if you want to build a decent looking website then its much better to go for a premium theme. For ease of use coupled with custom designs and advanced features, one of the best places to find the perfect theme is https://themeforest.net/.
Once on the themeforest website click on web themes and templates and then just below that, click on the "Wordpress" filter to show only themes that are built for use with WordPress.
You can look through this list and find your desired theme. It is generally better to pick the higher value themes - typically around $59 - as they normally have more features such as visual content editors, slider wizards and other premium plugins.
Once you find the theme that you want to use you can pay for the theme and then download the files. When downloading, select "all files and documentation" as this will provide you with the theme installation files as well as the documentation for setting up and customizing the theme.
Once you have downloaded the theme files you need to extract the folder. Inside of the primary folder you will see the documentation folder as well as a further zip file for the theme files themselves - extract this file and navigate to the theme files themselves - if you are in the right place you should see folders including css, functions, images and includes among others. The folder (Typically named after the theme itself) that contains these files is the one that you will need to upload to your websites home directory.
In order to upload the theme to your website you will need an FTP client (Although there is a facility within WordPress for uploading theme files it doesnt always work that well, depending on the overall size of the theme, so we will do this via FTP instead.
Download your prefered FTP client; in this case we will be using Filezilla, which you can download here - https://filezilla-project.org/
Install and then open Filezilla and once the program is open we can add in the details for the website - to do this, click on File, site manager. Click on New Site and then add in the website address along with the cpanel username and password, then click on connect.
Once you are connected, navigate to your websites themes folder on the righthand panel - typically this will be located under public_html/wp-content/themes.
This is where you want to upload the theme folder that we downloaded in the previous step. After uploading, you should see a folder named after your purchased theme in this directory and inside of that folder you should see the folder structured detailed above (css, functions, images, includes etc).
Now its time to activate the theme - to do this, go back to the wordpress dashboard, click on appearance, themes and then click on "Activate" below your purchased theme.
Customizing your website via the wordpress theme
Once the theme is installed, it will look a little broken, this is because most themes have some setup procedure that has to be followed in order for the theme to work properly. This includes plugin installation, menu creation and other important tasks such as the addition of your logo.
To make this as easy as possible, almost all themes downloaded from theme forest come with their own documentation and setup guide - if you go back to the original file that we downloaded from theme forest and extracted, you should see a documentation folder. In here you will have a full documentation pack that you can open - this normally opens like a website and provides you with lots of information organised into headings. Follow the installation and setup part of this guide in order to get your theme running as planned.
There is normally an option in there as well that involves importing demo content for the theme and the end result of this is a website that looks pretty much like the demo site your saw when you were purchasing the theme. Once you get your website to this point you can customize it further to suit your needs by stripping out any of the demo content that you don't need and then customising the rest in terms of adding your own wording and graphics.
The end result
By this point you should have a fully working website, with your own custom domain name, your own hosting package and a wordpress installation that not only looks great but one that you are in full control of. Although you might start with a fairly basic site, this gives you the ability to expand the site as far as you can imagine including the addition of content, images, plugins, connectivity with other third party services and basically anything else your website might need as it grows in size.
The best part is, you have done all of this without really needing to learn any coding, without having to have any amazing design skills but you still have a privately owned website that is not reliant on any "build your own site" type of service where you are locked in for all eternity.
