Learn How to Design a Website in WordPress

WordPress makes designing and creating a website easy and approachable. A quick WordPress tutorial typically provides enough information to get started designing a WordPress website. However, a web developer class can give you the knowledge needed to add even more features to your page. 

What You Will Need to Design the Page

Before you learn how to design a website in WordPress, you need to have a domain name for your website and a WordPress hosting service to store your files. You will also need to install WordPress on your web hosting dashboard, which should be readily available regardless of your chosen hosting company. 

Start With a Theme for the Website

Your first step in designing a website for WordPress is choosing a theme to control the appearance of your page. There are thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes to choose from, both free and paid.

How to Design a Website in WordPress: Adding the Theme

Visit your WordPress admin dashboard to choose your theme. Click on “Appearance” and then “Themes,” then choose “Add New.” This will take you to the page where you can search thousands of themes, with various sorting features available, including industry, layout, featured, latest and price. Themes can help to streamline the process of designing a website, as they take care of the visual aspect for you. 

After you choose a theme and click “Install,” you can select “Customize” from the Appearance menu, which gives you a list of features to customize on your theme as well as a live preview. As you select your customization options, WordPress automatically takes care of the coding. 

Add Content

The next step in designing a website in WordPress is to add content to your page, which can be done via pages or posts. 

Pages vs. Posts

A page is a one-off piece of static content like your Contact or About page. By contrast, posts are blog posts, and they will appear on your website in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts at the top of the page. 

How to Design a Website in WordPress: Adding the Content

Adding a page to your WordPress website is simple: go to the Pages section of the admin area and select “Add New.”

The page editor makes learning how to design a website straightforward since you simply fill it out like a form with categories for the name of the page, its permalink and your content. You can adjust the font and other elements of the content’s appearance or add media. Most WordPress tutorials will recommend you take advantage of tags and categories on posts or blogs to attract visitors. 

After you arrange your page how you want, click “Publish” and it will go live on your website. Add as many pages with as many styles as you want. 

Adjusting the Website

Now it’s time to make adjustments and minor tweaks to ensure your website looks as presentable and professional as possible. 

Static Front Page

One of the most important parts of designing a website on WordPress is to create a static front page. Visit the admin area and go to “Settings,” then “Reading.” Look at “Front page displays” and choose “A static page.” From there, choose a static page from your previously created pages, one each for the “Front page” and the “Posts page.” Saved changes will go into effect immediately. 

Title and Tag

The default tagline is highly impersonal: “Just another WordPress site.”

To adjust these features, visit “Settings” and then “General.” The site title and tagline are near the top of the settings, and you can change them at any time. You can also choose to leave out a tagline, but it is a wise decision to include one. 

Navigation Menus

Visitors need to be able to access your pages, so you will need to learn to create the navigation menu. This is as simple as visiting the Appearance page and going to “Menus.” Under the “Edit Menus” tab, you will see a link to “Create a new menu.” Click it and create a name for your menu, then click “Create Menu.”

To the left, you will see a list of the pages you have created on your WordPress website. Select the pages you want in the menu and click “Add to Menu.” To the right, you will see a section for “Menu Structure” and “Menu Settings.” Your selected pages will automatically appear under “Menu Structure.” 

Visit “Menu Settings” to choose where the menu appears, keeping in mind that available locations depend on the theme you chose. 

Comments

There is no coding required to include comments if you use WordPress since the feature is built-in and easy to enable. 

Most WordPress tutorials will encourage you to make some minor changes to the comment area to prevent an inundation of spam comments. First, go to “Settings” and then “Discussions.” Scroll down a little and you will see, “Before a comment appears.” Check the box that says, “Comment must be manually approved.” Now, you will be able to approve comments before they appear. 

Install Plugins in WordPress

Plugins are essential for adding features like photo galleries and contact forms without relying on knowledge from a web developer class. There are nearly 50,000 free plugins on WordPress, so use filters to search them. Then install the plugin, and the feature appears. Don’t forget to add security plugins as well. 

Advancing Your Knowledge of How to Design a Website

Now that you know the basics of how to design a website in WordPress, you might want to consider attending a web developer class in San Francisco to get more in-depth information about how to enhance your website. 

*Please note, these articles are for educational purposes and the topics covered may not be representative of the curriculum covered in our boot camp. Explore our curriculum to see what you’ll learn in our program.