It’s easy for anyone to get started with WordPress and build their own website these days. All our hosting accounts come with the great Softaculous installer which will get WordPress installed for you with just a few clicks.
Once you have WordPress installed, you should find yourself a nice WordPress theme to get started with, there are lots of free and premium options – a great way to find them is to try Google searches for terms such as:
Often WordPress theme development companies will release free “lite” versions of their premium themes, these can be a great start.
Don’t know where to start? Start with some Google-Fu (that means ‘advanced Googling techniques’ in English) and simply search for other people’s lists. Yep, blogs love making lists of stuff, and the best free and premium WordPress themes and plugins in various categories are one of those things. Try it, let’s say you are searching for a theme for a small hotel that needs booking functionality (or at minimum an email booking enquiry form, which is easily done with a contact form in any theme), I would start by searching for something like “best responsive wordpress hotel theme”, or “best free wordpress theme for hotels”, you can add keywords for current web design trends like “responsive”, “parallax”, “flat”, to get specific about those items, and of course “free” for free themes only. Another useful tip is you can also add “2014” to the search to narrow it down to the latest. Using this method you should find dozens of blog articles listing out themes that they have found, often they provide some useful information to go with them. Have a look through and open up any theme that takes your fancy for a demo.
This also applies to WordPress plugins; core functionality like forums, ratings, events, adverts, etc have all been covered heavily on blogs which list out their top picks. Now the blog may not have tried every single one, but it’s a good starting place and often a good way to find the latest good plugins, since many lists are compiled from the latest releases to keep their own content fresh.
Constantly New Features & Designs
This is the best thing about working with themes, right now they are being released by so many great people and so often, that you have a completely new selection now from the themes you were looking at just a few weeks ago – and new ones are being added and developed constantly. These new WordPress themes also often feature functionality and levels of customisation that really pushes the boundaries of WordPress and has never been done before. There is no need to constantly reinvent the wheel when thousands of super talented people are doing just that – working tirelessly to design, code and develop amazing themes for us to download and use for just fifty dollars.
Read our other blog post for more advice on selecting the perfect WordPress theme. Or read through the other posts on our blog for more WordPress tips & training.
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