I’ve been using WordPress as a publishing platform for almost twenty years this year, having built my first site using that platform in August of 2007. Until that time I had built my websites using HTML. WordPress was a big step forward.
Since then I have played around Joomla and Drupal as well, but always preferred WP.
Getting the foundations right is the key to any project, whether you are building a house, a website or even a business. If the foundation isn’t right, nothing that you try and build on top of it will be either.
The most vital part of building a website with WordPress is getting the database set up properly. If you are doing it yourself, you can either do it manually using the config file provided in the software, and set up the database yourself on the web server. Getting the usernames and passwords etc. exactly correct is essential, or you can be in a world of pain trying to figure out where you went wrong.
Softaculous is a program that you can use to set the site up automatically. It is provided by most web hosts in cPanel. I thought I’d give it a whirl when I set this site up, but soon deleted it and started again. It tried to install a legion of WordPress themes that I had no interest in, especially as I was intent on building the one that you are presently viewing.
The Life Theme is a child theme of GeneratePress which I built myself with the aim of making reading my content easier, with out all the flashy stuff trying to get my readers’ attention. Softaculous took away my ability to do that, and software that makes things easy can tend to do that. I find that “easy” doesn’t teach me anything and tends to make me lazy.
Of course, before you can lay the foundations of anything, you need to have a vision of what you want to do, how you want the site to look, and how you wish to interact with your audience, what you are going to write and so on.
My first WordPress site, Coffee With Allan is slightly different in tone and content to The Life, though I believe that my writing voice is similar on both sites. It’s built on a similar philosophy of easy reading, and uses a Blocksy child theme, featuring lots of white space. I fell in love with that style years ago using the old Genesis framework.
The other thing to look at when building your site is to consider which “plugins” to use for things like security, contact forms, statistics and so on. Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that you have to install a ton of plugins – you don’t. You could just cause problems like a slow loading site among others.