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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.

You're most likely to want to simply hide certain page elements, especially when setting up a website rather than a blog. For example, in my theme there's an information bar at the top of each blog entry that I wanted to remove - by using the Web Developer toolbar I could see that its CSS selector is called .post-meta-top, and to make it vanish I added the line:

display: none;

I applied the same line to .post-meta-bottom, then repeated this process to hide or edit various other elements until I had exactly the look I wanted. Take a look at the theme "DeepBlue" and compare it with the final design of Kool Driving School. Once you've finished making these changes, don't forget to set the permissions on all files back to "644".

Adding functionality

WordPress's real trump card is the enormous range of plugins available to enhance your site's functions. To add a plugin go to Plugins in the dashboard and select Add New, then use a keyword search to find the right one for your need. In the case of Kooldrivingschool.co.uk, my first and most important requirement was for potential customers to be able to contact us, so I searched for "contact form" and decided on the "WP-Contact" plugin.

Once you've selected a plugin, click Install, specify your FTP details and it will install itself. On clicking Settings in the dashboard (bottom left) you'll see the new plugin, in my case "Contact", at the bottom. Now you can decide how you want your plugin to look and operate: for my contact form, I chose an email address for all emails to go to. With most plugins you then insert a keyword into your page to indicate where you want its form to appear. While I didn't get exactly the contact form I'd have chosen if I'd written it myself, using the plugin saved a huge amount of time, and enabled me to get the site running far more quickly.

For Kool Driving School I added two more plugins. The first was SEO Title Tag, which allowed me to specify a browser window title for each page and post - essential when running a Google AdWords campaign and for general search engine optimisation. Broadly speaking, these titles should contain all the main keywords you'd expect your customer to type into a search engine to find that page. Lastly I added Custom Meta, which allowed me to customise the login box. The default "Meta" box includes all sorts of guff I didn't want my visitors to face, and this allowed me to bypass the default widget and include only the functions I wanted.

That's more or less it. I spent a while messing with the CSS until it was exactly what I wanted, but nevertheless I'd created a fully functional, Google-friendly site with a customised design in a couple of hours. As a final tip, click the Turbo button in the top-right corner, which lets you use Google Gears to speed up the responsiveness of the WordPress editing interface.

When to WordPress

If you can create a site using WordPress in an hour or two, why would you ever want to create one from scratch? For a start, despite its vast range of plugins, WordPress can only be extended so far, and you won't be able to exercise quite the same level of control over it as a custom-built site. The more sophisticated your site is, the less likely that WordPress can cope. Having said that, you can get both PayPal and shopping cart plugins for WordPress, so e-shopping sites are possible, whether you're selling goods for yourself or acting as an affiliate or Amazon Associate. It may well be that WordPress can provide the platform for an initial site while you're testing a business idea, and if successful you might then want to invest in a custom-built site, which is exactly the approach we're taking with GreetingCardMaker.co.uk.