Show Love To People - Learn Web Design - Steemit Virus Contest

Hello friends! Smyle is here once again to participate in the @steemit-virus contest that reward creative writers. Today, I will be sharing an important information with you guys. 

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This particular contest is a special one because it intends to add value to people’s life through the works of contestants. I will be sharing with us Web Designing. I will focus mainly on WordPress. This is the way i think i can add value to your life by teaching you how to design a website!

WordPress is an open-source content management system that is based on PHP and MySQL. It is a free open source and it allows every developer to come up with good ideas and share it on their platform.

Every good developer can come up with a WordPress theme and sell on their platform. You can also design the theme and give it out to people for free. There are many free themes on the WordPress system.

The amazing thing about WordPress is that it has amazing and beautiful themes that are ridiculously free to use. Each time i click on the 'editor' of any theme to see the edit or or two things, i am always amazed because it takes time to put up a beautiful theme.

Without boring you much on some terms, let design a blog together.

To build a standard and good blog, you need to do three things

1)   Get A Domain Name

 2) Get A hosting

 3) Download WordPress

 4) Install/Upload Theme

1) Domain is an identity or something owned by an individual. We have visited some blogs and what we type as ‘www’ followed by the unique name after it is the domain name. steemit.com is a domain name. Domain name is something that must be short and easy for users to remember. Do not look for a complex name. Just get a unique and simple name that anybody can easily remember.

You can get a domain name on goddady.com. As a Nigerian, I use Qservers.com because it is cheap and they have good customer relations. A domain is 3,500 - 4,500 naira.

2) The other important thing is to buy a hosting plan. Hosting is what makes your website or blog visible to the world. Without hosting, a website cannot be accessed. 

There are some free hosting out there which you can also use. I will not recommend any because they always give limited access and few disk space. WordPress offers free hosting too but they will show adverts on your blog or website. The best thing is to buy yours. 

The important thing to consider when buying hosting plan is the DISK SPACE and Bandwidth. Please this is very important. If you are an entertainment blogger, you can try the ‘starter pack’ for 3,500 naira yearly. The important thing is the disk. Just like flash drive where we store things, all the files on the website (texts, music, pdf, videos etc) are stored in the disk. So if you must pick the first, then you know you cannot store heavy things on your blog.

The hosting comes with Cpanel (explained below) which is the place you will always login to to see how many disk space you have left, the bandwidth you have used and so on.

The advantage of hosting your blog or website is that it gives you control over your website and you also have free customized emails. If your website is smylenaija.com for instance, you can have [email protected], [email protected]. You can have as many as you want.

3) Download WordPress

You need to download WordPress on the hosting you bought via the Cpanel. Login to your Cpanel, scroll down to Softaculous Apps Installer and click WordPress. 

You will see install button, click it and install WordPress on your hosting. See image below

Once you have installed the WordPress, go to the backend of your domain name to login as a WordPress admin. Let's use this example:

www.smylenaija.com/wp-admin

If you enter the command above (your own domain), you will see login and password. Enter the login and password you created when you installed/uploaded the WordPress. See below images!

There are two ways to put theme on your WordPress. You either upload it from your computer or install it directly. To upload it, you need to download theme on the WordPress.org site. Look for any fine theme and download it to your computer, then upload it on your WordPress.

To install it, just look for any theme you like on the WordPress backend of your site and click install.

Once you installed or uploaded it, just click activate! Once activated your website is already live on the internet for everybody to see and access.

The next thing is to customize your website. Customization means giving your website the look you want it to have. It is like tweaking some things on the theme. Colour, text, the preview, logo, copyright etc. It is the easiest thing to do because there is a preview on the right side which will display result of your tweaks to you immediately.

That is all about designing a website. 

Note that web designing require no specific skills. It is web development that is more complex and require more time. So don’t mix the two together. Web development is different from web design. Web design is what I just explained above. 

Please feel free to ask me any WordPress or Blogger related questions. This is how i think i can give you something free! 

Thanks for reading. Your boy @smyle the philosopher.

Images taken with computer screengrab