You will need some tools and software for building a website. Here is a handy checklist.
Make sure you have, or can obtain or create, all the nuts and bolts that you will need to build your new website. Beyond the obvious essentials like a computer and an internet connection, this is what you will need for building a website:
- A domain name
- Some website hosting with PHP and MySQL support
- A WordPress theme, pick the most suited from thousands of great free and premium themes.
- A collection of various WordPress plugins (not essential but required for additional functionality)
- 20 or more awesome photographs and images to use as backgrounds, headers, featured and slider images. Or grab a stock image website subscription and create your own collection.
- Written content! This is possibly the most important thing, this is why you are building your website in the first place – to get your message to the world. So get your message written and ready. Remember, this is more than just pages of text – for each of those main subject pages it is headlines, subheadings, excerpts, photo titles and captions, and you will find you need more and more snippets of text as you progress.
- A logo for your website, and a colour scheme – but if for some reason you don’t have a full brand manual and professionally designed corporate identity, you can let the theme guide you here as far as colours and fonts go, and just slot your logo in.
- Your time and energy. Don’t forget this one. Without you to create it nothing will get made, so make sure you can tick yourself off the checklist.
You will also need some computer software when building a website:
- A graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop, or something simpler (to resize and crop images). Regular old Windows Paint actually does the job fine – or grab the free GIMP for Windows, Mac or Linux– a popular multi-platform Photoshop alternative.
- A web browser (to view and build the website of course!). Actually it is suggested you install multiple web browsers for testing – try Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer. These big four covers 99% of users.
- An FTP program, you can get by without this but it can be useful to transfer files to and from your website. If you need one then try FileZilla as my pick of the free options, I like CuteFTP for heavier use.
That is pretty much it, you probably have everything already and can collect everything else along the way. So what are you waiting for? Start building a website today.