Building a wordpress website
There are no affiliates in this article. This is 100% us 🙂
Why You Should Be Building A WordPress Website
Customizable
WordPress is perhaps the most customizable website builder around. Because of it’s vast size (most of the internet is powered by WordPress), there is unlimited potential.
You can find any theme you want, so your website will look just how you want it to. We use Astra – and we’ll tell you why soon!
Building a WordPress website compared to others gives you more flexibility. You can even use the RSS to auto post content to places like Pinterest and Facebook.
Support
Because WordPress is such a popular platform, there is support everywhere you turn. Both from WordPress, and all over the internet.
You can find posts with questions and answer for building a Wordpress website all over places like Reddit, various forums, and social media groups that are dedicated to WordPress.
For beginners, this is huge!
Simple
Building a WordPress website can be as simple or complex as you need it to be.
There are drag and drop style page builders, or there are more complex and capable builders.
Our favorite by far is Generate Blocks, and we’ll be looking at building a page using Generate Blocks.
There are plugins to accomplish just about anything you could think of, so you’re website can be/do anything you would like!
Generate Blocks
We use Generate Blocks when we are building a WordPress website. It is a very lightweight page builder, which helps keep your website fast!
It is simple to use, but has loads of features – so it’s very capable.
You can use their template library to import containers to your page, and all you have to do is change the words and pictures and you’re good to go!
This is an incredible feature if you’re newer.
Generate Blocks is the fastest block editor for building a WordPress website that we have tested. Compared to others like Elementor, it’s a very noticeable difference in load speed and overall score for GTMetrix and Google Pagespeed Insights.
Astra Theme
Using the Astra theme is a great way to go for building a WordPress website! Selecting a fast, lightweight, and easy to customize theme is a very important part of having a fast, quality WordPress website.
It’s what we have used on several websites, and it works wonderfully.
The Astra theme is lightweight which helps improve load times (important for SEO and viewer retention).
It also has loads of capabilities and features which you can use to make a beautiful website.
Some of our favorite features for building a page on WordPress are in the Astra settings, with things like disabling the title, breadcrumbs, featured image, and more.
The Astra theme also makes it easy to customize your header and footer, which is absolutely vital for creating a high quality website!
There have various levels starting for free and going up from there.
Steps To Building A WordPress Website Page
The 1st Step
The First step to building a WordPress website page is going to be getting a headline going. We like to use a hero with a nice image, but you can run with a slider, or just a headline if you’d like!
To do this you’ll want to click on the little plus icon that will sit on the right hand side of the page, and add a container. You will see a search bar, so you can search for templates or a gallery or a container, depending on what you need. Inside the contain you’ll hit the plus button again, and you’ll go to Template Library.
If you’re adding a hero you can select the hero category, and you’ll be able to pick any that you like!
You will repeat this same step every time you’re adding something new. By default when you add a new container (or you can just hit enter when you’re done and it should add a new container – in which you can start typing and it just becomes a standard paragraph style container.
Then you will change the title and description to what you need it to be. You can mess with the font if you would like to further customize it. You can change color, highlight the text, and make it stand out!
You can also add buttons with custom links (like a button to a certain page on your website, or an external link). You will find templates in the template library for everything from Hero’s, Content blocks, social media buttons, regular buttons, and much more! It is worth exploring the templates and trying out new things to keep your website fresh and intriguing.
You will want to select the container itself and edit the background, which is where you will change the background image to be anything you want! You can add various things to make it interesting, such as gradient colors, shapes at the button (many of our pages use the shapes for fun). Every container will have this ability, so you can change the background image of every container if you want to!
To make a container be a full page image, you will want to go to spacing, and under minimum height put 100 and select VH instead of PX.
You’ll also want to change the container width to full width (or something like 2000) so it displays as a full page view.
See, building a WordPress website isn’t too hard!
Step Two!
This is where you’ll get into creating the actual content of the page. Depending on what you’re doing building a WordPress website- this can vary a lot. However, most of the time you’ll be using a template from the template library (they are awesome).
Everything on this page was built using a template and making the changes we needed to in order to make it fit our theme/use for the page. The galleries were added as a regular block (instead of going to template library, you search for gallery and click that instead)
When you’re building a WordPress website page for a blog post, you’ll want to make sure you break things up using headlines for each section.
You can also use the Generate Blocks template library and grab things from the content section. This is a great way to come up with ideas on keeping the page interesting and keeping readers engaged.
In the template library you will find many different options that have fun styles, layouts, and even use shapes on the container to add a little spice to things.
Building a WordPress website is done with blocks, and you can add blocks for anything and everything!
Whether you’re adding a newsletter subscription, or a contact form at the end of a page, or a gallery – there is a block for all of your needs.
Just like adding a contact form at the bottom our building a WordPress website post, so you can drop us a message without having to leave this page.
Contact Us Page
Now that you’ve taken the first step in building a WordPress website, and have created a wicked home page – it’s time to make sure you have a contact page. Customers will need to be able to reach out to you!
Building a WordPress website without a contact page is no good at all.
Now that you have taken the next step in building a WordPress website, and created a contact us page! It is time to make sure it’s showing up on the menu on your new home page!
Adding Pages To The Menu
Once you have created a new page, such as our contact us page, you want to make sure that it is displaying in your menu.
You’ll be able to create a new menu, or just modify the existing menu.
You can also create footer and primary menus (footer is the bottom of the page).
When you’re building a WordPress website, this comes in very handy. You can have things like account management, newsletter subscriptions in the footer of the page, while the most important pages are in the primary menu up top!
This will bring up the menu page.
This is also where you’ll go to change your theme, if you decide to go that route!
You want to make sure the menu organized how you would like it to be. (the logo in the header is a link to the home page – so you don’t need to have the home page in the menu)
You can pull a page underneath another page, which will make it show up as a drop down from that first page.
We have created custom links to act as a top anchor for other pages, such as our blog pages. This allows us to have them neatly organized under one drop down menu. That menu anchor – named blogs – does not have a link attached to it, so it will not take you anywhere.
Now you have a home page, a contact us page, the menu is set, and you’re ready to jump into the customization of your theme. This is where we’ll make sure the logo is set correctly and other various things.
Theme Customization
The next step we are going to take in building a Wordpress website, is going to be working on some theme customization. You’ll go back to appearance, and click on customization, which brings up a new page.
In here is where you will adjust the header, footer, set the home page, and do things like adjust the sidebar (if you want one – we do not use a sidebar for his website).
If you’re running a blog, you can set your home page to display your posts by default. We do not go this route because it does not allow you to customize the rest of the page. We like to add a little flare, but that is up to you!
When you’re building a WordPress website, you want to make it your own and fit what you’re doing!
You just go from the header to the site identity section, and will add an image for your logo. You simply scroll down from here to add your site Icon.
You can adjust the size to make sure it isn’t too big or too small.
If you’re running a logo, you want to make Sure you turn off the site title and line – that way it’s just the logo that is displaying.
You can run widgets in the footer menu for things like newsletter subscriptions, or display products, or sales. Just about anything you can imagine!
You just go to the appearance menu, click on the widgets section, and it will bring you here. Just like editing a page, you will click the little plus button, and you can grab whatever you’re looking for.
Building a WordPress website – Completed!
Now that you’ve built a home page, contact us page, set up your customization with your logo and site Icon, and made you’re menus – you’re ready to rock-n-roll! You can continue adding pages, or posts (just like a adding a page, but it displays as a blog post).
It would be time to work on WordPress optimization, which we talk about in another article. Feel free to take a look at that article, and let us know what thoughts and questions you have!