Learn How to Build Your Website for Free
In 2023, you can build your website for free and fully customise it with a powerful CMS called WordPress. In this article, we will show you how to build a website with WordPress and free open-source WordPress Theme and Plugins.
What Do You Need Before Building Your Website?
In order to build a fully functional website, you will need a domain and web hosting. With a domain and web hosting plan, you can create any website from a simple static 5-page website to a powerful e-commerce website without restriction.
If you do not have a domain or hosting plan yet, you can create a free account and get it here:
In this tutorial, we will use Starter Linux Hosting with cPanel (30GB) to build the website.
Step by Step Guide to Build Your Free Website
1. Link Your Domain to Your Web Hosting Plan
Log in to your free account at web.marven-industries.com
1) Under “All Products and Services”, click “Manage” button under “Web Hosting” tab.
2) Now at the dashboard, click “Add Website” button and key in your domain name without “www”.
3) After clicking “Add Website”, you will see your domain in the list with “Install Application” option.
4) Click “Install Application” button and you will be redirected to your cPanel page.
5) Scroll down to click “WordPress” icon followed by “install this application” button.
6) Select your domain and empty the “Directory (Optional)” field. In this case, you will build your WordPress application at /public_html folder.
7) Create your WordPress username and password. For email, you can use your personal email. Click “Install” button once you have filled in the details.
8) Browse yourdomain.com/wp-admin and key in your username and password to log in.
2. Install WordPress Theme
1) At your WordPress dashboard, click “Theme” and click “Add New”. Upload below theme zipped files.
2) Install the Theme Framework first and activate. Then, install Theme Sample and activate. You will see the sample packs in “Black and White” and “Color”. Install either one.
3) You will see a list of sample demo pages created under the “Page” section. You can start editing them in WordPress editor.
3. Create Your Page
From the dashboard, click on the “Pages” menu and select “Add New” to create a new page.
In the page editor, you can add content to your page using the visual editor or the text editor. The visual editor is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that lets you create content without any coding knowledge. The text editor, on the other hand, lets you add content using HTML or CSS.
WordPress offers a wide range of customization options to make your page unique. You can add images, videos, widgets, and plugins to your page.
Once you have added all the content and customized your page, you can preview it by clicking the “Preview” button. If you are happy with the result, click the “Publish” button to make your page live on the internet.
4. Create Your Menu
Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
On the left-hand side, click “Appearance” and then “Menus”.
Click the “Create a new menu” link.
You can now add menu items by selecting the pages, posts, or custom links you want to include in your menu.
Customize menu items by expanding the item in the menu editor and making changes to the Navigation Label, Title Attribute, CSS Classes, Link Target, and other options.
You can organize menu items by dragging and dropping them into the order you want.
Once you have added and organized your menu items, click “Save Menu” to save your new menu.
Assign the menu to a location. After saving the menu, you’ll need to assign it to a location. This is usually done by selecting a location from the “Menu Settings” section.
Preview your website to see your new menu.
Repeat the process to create more pages for your website and link them to your menu. Once you have done it, you will need to get website visitors to get leads and sales. To do this without paying for Google ads and social media ads, you can optimize your website to get free organic traffic. We call it SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
