Kironix Web Design

WordPress: What, Why and How to Get Started

WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool that can help your business create a website without spending a lot of time on the design of the site and how it functions. This is because once WordPress is installed on your website server you will then install one of thousands of WordPress themes that are available. It’s probably the easiest and most powerful website content management system (CMS) in existence today. And as important, most themes will automatically set up your website for look and feel, page layout, make it mobile friendly (responsive) to work on all devices, do form handling, add creative effects like image sliders and animation. Furthermore, WordPress plugins are available and are like smartphone apps. They can give you a free, top-notch shopping cart and connect you to all sorts of services your business may need.

Search through thousands of themes online and pick one that looks good to you and has the functionality that will serve your business or needs. Then you or your developer will add your own photos, video and text to the pages and out comes a website. Well, it’s not exactly that easy because one must decide on what pages to show, menu choices and content but that is necessary no matter what technology you use to build your website.

The first step in the process is to find a WordPress theme. A theme creates the look of a site and, usually, has most of the necessary programming already written.

You may Google “wordpress theme for xxx” with “xxx” being a keyword for your business, like travel agency or retail or real estate. If your business is not a common one there will probably be no categories so you might try related topics that may work. In some businesses, like travel agency, real estate, hotels, etc. you will find themes with functionality built in to meet the needs of your vertical market. Travel agency themes have booking systems, real estate themes have automatic listing abilities and hotel themes have reservation systems. Themes range from free to less than $100. The real cost lies in the setup but this is often much cheaper than starting a website from scratch.

Among others, I like Theme Forest (https://themeforest.net/). They have thousands of themes from which you can search. Unfortunately, Theme Forest, and other providers of themes, list themes without showing a preview. Go down the list and if something looks interesting click the icon. Then, under the screenshot, click Live Preview. This will give you a general ideal of the look of the theme. Naturally, it will look different with your text, photos, menu, etc. Many themes have alternate looks so find a few and send me links and we can talk.

Here’s one I like without even searching much. Imagine it with your photos. http://preview.themeforest.net/item/adventure-tours-wordpress-tourtravel-theme/full_screen_preview/12781942?_ga=2.122520331.1042401353.1500941511-1173956724.1458752504. Scroll down the page. This is a “parallax” theme which means the page is long and in sections matching your menu pages. It’s very effective and popular for modern sites. We would eliminate what you don’t need and put in what you do need. Easy.

Next, make a list of pages (subjects) you envision. Home, About, Rentals, Touring, Gallery, Blog, History, Contact, Shop, Our Mission, Products are a few. Once you have this list you/we will need to develop text apropos to each page. We can make this easy. This will be the biggest part of this project. I envision not only showing the meat and potatoes of your business offerings but focus on making visitors new customers. That is the marketing side of web development and here at Kironix we do that well.

You will also need to put together a bunch of photos representing your brand. People, factory, products and anything related to your business and its end-users. Hi resolution is best. We can always reduce.

Questions for now? Please call or email. This’ll be fun and we will help make it easy.

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