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Creating a basic SOHO website Pt. 2-templates and FTP
Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 25 August 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
Now that you have a domain name for your business and a hosted website it’s time to think about what sort of site you want to build.
This tutorial is intended for those who, like us, want a basic website that provides information to your customers and provides a means for them to contact you for more, should they need it. That’s not to say that we want a boring and dull site. It should be interesting enough to catch the attention of web surfers who are looking for the type of service or product you provide without overwhelming them with music, flashing banners or slow page loading times. I’ll be using the experience of putting CW San Diego together as a guide throughout these posts.
The first order of business is to decide which type of platform you are most comfortable working with. There are many choices, from the complex and highly customizable (Drupal and Joomla are two of the more popular in this category) to the simple and easily constructed (like most of the “site builder” applications offered by web hosts). I like to compare Drupal to Cisco. Both allow you to do the same thing less complicated solutions do but offer a ton of options the others don’t. The tradeoff is that their systems are so complicated that you need special training to set them up. Cisco offers training to become “Cisco certified”; Joomla and similar frameworks do not offer specific training. If you decide to go the Joomla route, or if you want to have a website with a lot of flash content, you’ll need to track down a web designer with expertise in those areas. You’ll probably pay quite a bit to get decent results.
Perhaps you don’t want to put together your site, though. Maybe you have an employee, friend or family member with the skills to build the site you envision. Just remember, beyond the initial setup of a website there’s the sometimes daily need to refresh the content and keep the site interesting and attractive. Maybe you’re willing to pay a substantial amount every month to someone who will maintain your site for you, we weren’t. We wanted an option that allowed us to learn how to create and maintain our site ourselves.
A much more practical and easy-to-work-with framework for a SOHO website is WordPress, the software that powers CW San Diego. WordPress occupies the middle ground between the technically complicated Drupal and the totally unsophisticated and limited “site builder” type applications. Most of the templates available for the WordPress platform are feature-rich enough to use as is but also flexible enough to allow for a lot of customization. If you’ve ever used a desktop publishing application to create your own Christmas or birthday cards on a computer, you most likely have the skills necessary to build a reasonably effective website using WordPress.
The biggest advantage of using WordPress is its fan base. So many people use WordPress (WP) that they are constantly creating new themes and submitting them to the WP community and that community has a forum in which they offer advice to new users. The number of plug-ins, little bits of additional software that provide a specific function to your WP site are as numerous as the themes. Currently the official WordPress site offers 10,932 plug-ins and 1,217 themes. Plug-ins and themes allow you to make your site as simple or complex as you desire. And the ease of installing and deactivating themes and plug-ins means you can experiment and try different configurations without having to start from scratch every time you want to make a change in either the layout or functionality of your site.
There is an official collection of WordPress themes here, and you can Google “WordPress themes” for even more. Most are free but there are premium themes available that cost from $20 on up. Select a theme that has the overall look you’d like to have on your site. You can always customize it later after it has been installed.
One last comment about WordPress. It comes in two “flavors”. You can download the software and install it on web space you are renting from a host (called “self-hosted”, this is the option we’ll be using for the rest of these tutorials) or you can let WordPress host your site on their servers. There are several reason that this is a less beneficial solution for a business site, none of which I’ll go into right now. Considering the low cost and flexibility of having a self-hosted site, I think that’s the best option for the SOHO business person.
Download and Upload WordPress
The next step, now that we have a domain name and webspace, is to download the WordPress software and install it on our website. Downloading is easy enough. Go to http://wordpress.org/ and click on the “Download WordPress” button. Pay attention to where your browser is downloading it. Once the download is complete, browse to the folder where you downloaded it and unzip the file. (Note: if you aren’t sure how to unzip a file then trying to install and maintain a website, no matter how basic, is probably beyond your skill set. Best to ask someone more comfortable with operations like zipping and unzipping, up- and down-loading and FTP to install and maintain your site for you)
Now you need to move these files from your hard drive to your webspace. The best tool for this job is a stand-alone FTP application. “FTP” stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, the standard for uploading and downloading files from the internet to a local computer and back. I have two favorite FTP applications, which one I recommend depends on the operating system on your computer. If you use a Mac or any version of Linux I’d suggest using Filezilla. It’s versatile, feature rich and perhaps best of all, it’s free. If you use Windows you, too, can use Filezilla, although the shareware WS_FTP has even more features than Filezilla.
You’ll need to read and follow the specific directions for using either Filezilla or WS_FTP, but the basic idea is that you want to move the unzipped WordPress folders and files from your computer to your webspace. You’ll also want to check out WordPress’ installation instructions before you upload anything. There is a particular file you need to fill with information from your webhost before you upload to your site.
Now, providing you followed the directions from WordPress and used your FTP client correctly, you should have a basic website at your domain’s URL.
Next time we’ll consider content and SEO.
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