Patrick Alan

I’m not a web designer. I’m not a web programmer. I am graphically challenged. I can take good screen shots. That’s about the extent of my web capabilities.

That’s sort of a lie. I can edit HTML. I have a basic understanding of CSS and can tweak it if I really need to. I do my best to avoid it, though.

My contention is, any small business needs a website. It doesn’t matter if you are a landscaper, author, custom soap manufacturer, or spiritualist. What ever your business, you should have a website.

And you can have one for free, that looks decent, doesn’t crash, and you can create and maintain all by yourself. I am going to show you. I know this works, because I did it for my dad to host his Golf League website on.

All that Free stuff said, I recommend paying ~$20 per year to register a domain name, just because it looks more professional. Don’t do that first though. Create your free website, get some experience with it then move on.

Ready? It might take you 20 minutes. Depends how much you want to play with it. This site took me about 10 minutes to make. Of course, I know how to use Wordpress already. Play around with it. Pretty simple. Pretty basic. But, covers what most people need.

Basically, the recommendation is
1. Go to Wordpress.com
2. Create a ‘blog’
3. Modify the ‘blog’ so it is a ‘website’
4. Register your domain name
5. Update your ‘blog’ so it uses the domain name.

You could probably do the same thing with Blogger.com/Blogspot.com. The reason why I recommend Wordpress.com is that it allows you to grow from there. Wordpress.org is the open source version(even more free stuff) of Wordpress - where you can customize it even more, host it on your own servers and all these other neat things. My website is Wordpress hosted on 1and1.com.

Step 1 & 2 go together. Go to Wordpress.com - register and create a blog.

So far. Pretty easy.
Now you have a blog that looks like this.

Well, you probably want to change from the default. So, click on “My Dashboards” up at the top and select the blog you just named. Don’t worry if you don’t like the name. You can always create another one.

So let’s change the “Appearance”. On your dashboard, on the left hand, expand Appearance and Select “Theme”

For a really simple website, select a 1 column website. I personally like having those navigation buttons up at the top of a website. You can spend days playing around and picking different themes. Seriously. You can’t break it. Change it. Change it again!

Actually, just pick one and go with it. You want to get to content.
On the left hand side, click “Pages” and then “Add New”

For “Pages” these are your main contents. If you look at my sample, you’ll see the ones I think are important to create - Main, News, About, Contact. Your business may require more. Note: “Home” is just a link put in by the “template” I chose. It links to “Main”.

Another thing I recommend, since you are creating a website, not a blog, Uncheck “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings”. You don’t want messages on your informational pages. You can leave those open on your ‘News’ posts.

Now, you want the website to open to a static page. The greeting page of your website. (Maybe you don’t, but that makes it more of a blog than a website.) Well, I apologize, but I missed the whole screenshot. From your Dashboard - Under “Settings”, select “Reading”

Switch so your first page is “Main” and your Post page is “News” This way, your “blog” is really just a great place for announcements.

So - the gist of it is - Pages show up and stay up. Posts show up on the “News” page. From your dashboard, Under “Posts” -> “Edit” then delete the default post. Then create your first piece of news.

That’s it. Now you have a website. Now that you have some content, go spend some more time playing with themes!

Oh, and Widgets. Those are the things I have over on the right. In my sample, they are at the bottom. Each template puts them in different places.

Every template will have defaults where the widgets go, but if you want to customize, just go to Widgets under Appearance. I like to put Pages, Stats, and Recent Posts up.

And when you finally get it to where you want, now is when you consider registering a Domain name, so you can tell people to go to AReallySimpleWebsite.com instead of AReallySimpleWebsite.Wordpress.com.

You can buy domains through Yahoo, GoDaddy, 1and1, or a thousand other registrars. After that, “Domains” are under Settings in your Dashboard.

That’s it. Hopefully it was easy and made sense to you. Customizing beyond that is a little more complicated, but you can get a decent website and if you want to expand, you can hire someone to design you a custom theme and find you a webhost.