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How to build a website in two hours

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 10:57

With a little bit of help from wordpress, Kevin Partner reveals how to design and launch a website in a couple of hours.

Let's look at some specifics. There are three main open-source CMS platforms: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Both Joomla and Drupal are true CMSes, designed primarily to handle applications where the site's content is going to be created, edited and managed by a group of people rather than a single webmaster. Both are extremely powerful but represent overkill for creating general-purpose websites. For the small-to-medium business I almost always recommend WordPress.

Hang on a minute, isn't WordPress a blogging platform? Of course it is, but what's a blog but a load of content organised by date and category? If that was all WordPress could do it wouldn't be suitable for general-purpose websites, but as any user knows, you can also add static pages to your blog, and it's these that will form the backbone of your website. Furthermore, you can extend WordPress' capabilities by installing any of 4,000 third-party plugins.

To inspect three very different WordPress implementations, take a look at www.scribbleit.co.uk, www.greetingcardmaker.co.uk and www.kooldrivingschool.co.uk. Scribbleit is my own blog and is a pretty standard WordPress installation, with a custom theme and a couple of plugins aimed at catching spam comments and making it easy for readers to "digg" a particular post. GreetingCardMaker.co.uk lies somewhere between a blog and a standard website - I built it to drum up interest ahead of a product launch later in the year. It contains a range of articles created by third-party authors, but I've set the first post on its front page to "sticky", so that a welcome text always appears. My plan for this site is to promote it via Google AdWords, so search engine optimisation is more important than for Scribbleit. Accordingly, the plugins for this site include one to help generate a Google XML sitemap, and enhanced user-registration and "recommend this article" plugins to help spread the message. Kool Driving School isn't a blog at all, but a fully working brochure-type website that took me perhaps two hours in total to create from scratch, including installation, customisation and plugins.

Up and running with WordPress

To install WordPress you'll need a web server running PHP 4.3 or later and MySQL 4.0+, although you'll be hard-pushed to find a web server nowadays that doesn't meet those requirements. You also need FTP access and the capability to create a MySQL database, and in most cases you'll be able to do this using the user interface your host provides. Indeed, if you're running cPanel with Fantastico installed, you can get WordPress up and running in a couple of clicks. Even so, I'm going to cover the manual installation process here:

1. Download the zip file for the current version from WordPress.org and extract its contents to your local hard drive.

2. Fire up the graphical interface for your web space, and create a MySQL database and a user account for it. To generate a password go to www.goodpassword.com

3. Find a file called wp-config-sample.php using Windows Explorer and rename it to wp-config.php.

4. Open wp-config.php in a text editor and at around line 19 add your database name. At line 22 add your database username and at line 25 your database user password. This will allow the WordPress installation process to create the appropriate database structure during setup.

5. In your FTP program (FileZilla is a good, free, choice), copy the entire folder structure to the root of your website. You should see directories such as wp-content and wp-admin branching off the root if you did it right.