In the first part about building a blog, I discussed the first steps you have to take before starting to build the blog itself: acquiring a domain name and a host. In this part, I will continue to show you my journey and explorations in the world of building a website. For myself, it was important to at least get a bit of understanding of how everything works and mainly to answer my question: “what kind of technology is behind the fact that building a website is so easy nowadays?”. You don’t have to be a wizkid anymore with insane programming skills to build a great website and I wanted to know why.
WordPress
I used WordPress.org to build my blog. There is also a commercial, hosted version of WordPress.org that is named WordPress.com. The main difference is that WordPress.org is self-hosted and WordPress.com is hosted by the company WordPress. Both are open-source website creation platforms and content management systems (CMS). They are written using PHP as the scripting language. Although both are open-source, WordPress.org has far more plugins to use than WordPress.com.
The reason why I chose WordPress.org is that my website hosting has this option in its standard offer. Additionally, I like the fact that there are more options/plugins available and that it is fully decentralized (not coordinated by a commercial company). I don’t think WordPress.com is more user-friendly than the .org version. Setting up the site in .org was not that hard, although I got into trouble at the beginning. But that was before I even started building the website. But hey, as they say: “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs”.
After the basics, it was time to check out how WordPress worked. First stop: PHP.
PHP
PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a server-side scripting language that is used to develop Static websites, Dynamic websites or Web applications. WordPress is an example of a Dynamic website.
Just like WordPress, PHP is also Open Source. This means that people can modify the software and share this freely. Its design is publicly accessible because the source code is accessible to anyone.
PHP is a server-side programming language. If I as a user request a web page that contains PHP, the code is processed by the PHP module that is installed on that web server. The PHP module then generates HTML (Hypertext Markup Language: the standard language used for documents to be displayed in a web browser) output to be displayed on the user’s browser screen. It translates the code into HTML. Below you can see a very simple example of PHP coding to get a feeling how it looks like:
I’m not a programmer but still, I’m able to set up a website with WordPress. This is because you can use WordPress without ever learning to program or code in PHP. But if I would like to develop a WordPress theme, a plugin or modify the default behavior of WordPress by using actions and filters so that other users can benefit from this, I would have to learn the basic syntax of PHP along with HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets: used to define visual appearance and formatting of HTML documents). Summarized: users don’t have to know the basics of PHP, HTML and CSS but contributors do.
CMS
A content management system (CMS) is software that is used to build a website and create content that you can publish on the internet. A CMS allows you to create a website without writing any code. That is the real magic of WordPress and the reason why so many people can easily share their creativity and knowledge with others on the internet. In my opinion, this is one of the most beautiful and powerful tools available in this world: the power of sharing with others in a very easy way, wherever you live and no matter the background you have. This is one of the reasons why I love technology so much!
In the early days of the web (late 90’s/beginning 00’s), you needed to know HTML to be able to code a website and to publish your content online. This was pretty hard to do because it takes a lot of time to learn HTML programming. Because of this, setting up a website back then was a lot of trial and error and a pretty expensive venture: time-wise and money-wise. And after the website was set up, you needed to have a significant amount of time and/or money to publish content regularly online.
With the introduction of CMS, this was much easier. Instead of writing your website code from scratch, the CMS software does this for you.
Think about it like a computer. You don’t need to understand all the mechanics behind how it’s operated. Instead, you just push the turn-on button and use a simplified operating system to give commands to the computer. CMS works the same.
A powerful CMS platform like WordPress gives you the ability to log into a simplified dashboard from where you can create your own web pages, add content and customize your design to make your way of sharing your interests and knowledge with the world more personal. The CMS does the hard work after that by creating the code for you.
With the support of CMS, you can start your own blog, start an online store, create portfolios and much more.
There are many more great CMS options like Squarespace (overall website builder), Shopify (E-Commerce), Ghost (blog site builder), Magento (E-Commerce) and many more. If you are interested in using a CMS platform, just Google on “best CMS platforms” and you will get a long list of options with pros and cons that can support you in making the decision that suits you best.
MySQL
WordPress uses MySQL as a database management system to store and receive all your information. You can see a database as a filing cabinet and WordPress uses this cabinet to organize and store all the important data from your website (pages, posts, images, etc.). MySQL is the name of the company that created this type of filing cabinet.
Like WordPress and CMS, MySQL is also Open Source. It is a relational database management system and runs as a server. It allows multiple users to create and manage numerous databases.
When you select a web hosting provider they have to support MySQL: the MySQL software has to be installed on their server. Most of the web hosting providers already have this but make sure to check if they have MySQL available when you select a provider.
To organize and store the filing cabinet and to retrieve data from it (so actually the MySQL database but let’s keep talking in the analogy we used), WordPress uses the PHP programming language. To retrieve data from the file cabinet and to send data to the file cabinet, WordPress runs SQL queries to dynamically generate content. SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is the programming language that is typically used for query databases (also called relational databases)
Logging into the WordPress Dashboard
Now that I got a bit of an understanding of how everything works, it was time to make my hands dirty. First I logged into the WordPress admin area. You can do this simply by going to your website and add /wp-admin. But it seems that /admin also works (I remembered that from my Magento days when I had a small webshop). In my case this was https://technology-gate.com/admin. Then I entered the login screen:
After logging in I entered the WordPress dashboard:
Setting up your website
The next step was to start setting up everything. As I said before, what I love about technology is the power of sharing with others. This was also the case in my situation. YouTube has great instruction videos on how to create your website. In combination with a bit of problem-solving (by consulting Google or reading/asking around on forums) and curiosity from your side, it’s easy to create a site. I will share the most important tips that I got from these videos:
- Start installing a few basic plugins. In my case I used:
- All-in-one WP migration: very handy to quickly backup, export and import your full site;
- Elementor: with this plugin, you can easily drag and drop in the page builder, pixel-perfect design, mobile responsive editing, and more. It is very handy because you can use a more dynamic way of building;
- WP forms lite: this is a beginner-friendly WordPress contact form plugin. You can use the drag & drop form builder to create WordPress forms. I used this for instance for my contact form.
- Select a suitable theme. This really helped me a lot getting up to speed and is the biggest time saver there is. If you want to pain yourself as a beginner to build up a site in WordPress from scratch without a theme, be my guest but I would really advise you to just use a theme. WordPress has a few basic themes but by selecting “add theme” there is plenty more to choose from. I used OceanWP as a theme. Ocean WP is one of the more popular WordPress themes because it is very customizable. It includes high-quality pre-made designs that are perfect for a beginner like me: I don’t want to reinvent the wheel in this. After the theme was installed, I ran the OceanWP setup wizard. After that you press “get started” and then you can choose a demo template. This template is the foundation of your website. It’s super easy to customize this demo and to shape your site the way you like.
- You can easily create a logo on https://www.logomakr.com if you don’t have the design skills (like I do) to create a logo all by yourself.
- Make sure you don’t just get random pictures on the internet to put on your website. Some pictures are copyright/royalty protected and if you use them without asking permission you can get a request from the creator to or remove it from you website (happens in most cases) or to pay for the picture. To prevent these kind of situations, use copyright/royalte free pictures. Pexels and Pixabay are great sites that offer free pictures for your website but if you want to find more sites that offer free pictures, Google is your best friend. Just type in “best free copyright picture sites”, and Google will do the rest of the search.
Final thoughts
Seeing this YouTube WordPress instruction video really brought me up to speed. By watching this video I understood all the basics that WordPress has to offer. You don’t have to exactly follow the guidelines. Personally, I liked the basic introductions of this video until midway in which the most important plugins and selecting a theme are discussed. I watched the second part as well but just to see how they completed the side. I selected a different pre-made design and started to explore building the site to my own liking after that. I like to start it off with a bit of help and then explore myself and solve the problems I run into during the process after grasping the basics.
Contact me for any questions, tips and/or advice relating to WordPress/building a website. If you want to keep in the loop when I upload a new post, don’t forget to subscribe to receive a notification by e-mail.
