Introduction – In this article I will be teaching on how to build or design a website using Wordpress.

Tools Required:

Your computer
Data connection (internet access)
Money (the money you will pay to host your website)

If you have provided the above required tools, let’s start!

With your computer, go to wampserver.com or you can Google search it with the keyword “wampserver” and download the version of “wamp” that suits your system OS. If you try downloading from their official website and you encountered any issue, you can download the “wamp software” from third party websites by Google searching “WAMPSERVER for PC” as your keyword. For example I’m running windows 10 64bit, so I will download “wamp server 3.2 64bit”. This is the latest version as of early 2020.

After your download, install the software via normal process of installing other Windows software.

Now go to Wordpress.org and download the latest Wordpress.

Click on “Get WordPress” as shown in the above image to download the Wordpress. The downloaded Wordpress file is normally in a zip file, so you need to extract it before you can use it.

“If you don’t have any software that can be used to extract files that are zipped, search for one and download. For example Google search “winrar software”, download and install it in your computer system. Once you are done with this, you can continue with the steps below”

Now extract the WordPress file to c:\\wamp64\www now rename the folder to “step”, for this tutorial/article we are designing a website for “step”.

Start the “wamp server” (I mean open the wamp server software) and go to your browser and type http://localhost

WAMPSERVER homepage

At the bottom left corner select “ADD VIRTUAL HOST”

See the details as I filled it out in the above image.

After you have filled the necessary information in the “add a virtual host”, go back to Homepage and select “phpmyadmin” at the bottom left corner – you can see it under “TOOLS”.

NOW IT’S TIME TO SELECT A DATABASE

Select “Database”

In the above image, I used “step” as the name of my database.

Now type on your browser http://step.local/

This should show up if you follow all the instructions correctly. Proceed by clicking on “Let’s go!”

Add the database name as “step” and username as “root”, leave password empty for now.

You can use any username and password of your choice and always add a working email for password recovery.

If you did everything well and got to this page, then congratulations. You are done with the setup.

Now go to your browser and type http://step.local/wp-admin and login using your username and password you used during the Wordpress setup.

This is Wordpress dashboard and it is what you should see once you login.

CUSTOMIZING YOUR THEME

There are already designed templates by professionals, you can get them from https://themeforest.net/

For this article I will be using one I already bought called “Salient”

Click on “appearance” and select “Themes”

Upload the theme of your choice here and activate it.

Now go to appearance > Install Plugins, install and activate all the plugins with required and recommended.

After installing the template, you can see it showing, I circled it Yellow. Select and chose “Import Demo data” (Demo Importer)

You will see this depending on the template you are using, importing demo data, and demo data is an already pre-designed website from the template.

Go to “Appearance” and select “Customize”

Set the homepage to a static page and chose the pre designed home page from the drop down.

Still on the “customize tab” select “site identity”

You can see the details as circled in the image above.

Now on your browser in your computer type http://step.local, the image above should display if you did everything very well.

At this stage the website is set up on your computer system. You can now do other setting like changing the images and the write ups of the website to your taste.

FOR YOU TO HOST YOUR WEBSITE ONLINE, FOLLOW THE PROCEDUE BELOW

For foreign hosting company, I use Namecheap, and for Nigerian hosting I use Syskay.com but you can use anyone you like.

On your browser go to http://localhost

At the bottom left corner select “phpmyadmin”

Select the database “step”

Click on “Export”

Click on “Go”

Save file

Now go to “www folder” in the “wamp” , select the step folder.

Right click and make it a zip file or compress it. Make sure that you have a software that can be used to compress files or to convert folders to zip file. You can download the software that you can use to compress files to zip here if you don’t have one.

NEXT WE NEED TO UPLOAD THIS ZIP FILE TO THE HOSTING ACCOUNT ONLINE TO MAKE THE WEBSITE LIVE

For you to upload the website to an online hosting account to make it become live, you need to first of all buy a “domain name” and a “hosting account”. You can buy one here Namecheap or Syskay.com.

Once you’ve bought a domain name and have a hosting account, you can now follow the below steps.

Go to the hosting company that you registered with and login into the cpanel (Control Panel), the login details will be sent to you after you pay for hosting.

When you login to the cpanel, select “File Manager”

Go to public_html

Click on the upload

This is the place where you upload the “step” zip file

Go back to cpanel and select “mysql database”

Create a new database, see how it’s done.

Now create a new user. I always use password generator for creating strong secure password. I will advise you to do so.

Add a new user to link up with the database you created earlier.

After adding user, it will bring you here, select all the privileges.

Then go back to cpanel and select phpmyadmin.

Select the database you created few steps back.

Select the import function to import the sql file you exported few steps back

This is what the import looks like.

If the import was successful, select the “wp_option”

See the changes you need to effect: the site url

For this article, I’m using a subdomain website noblecontracts.com so the site url is https://www.noblecontracts.com/step

You can see that the file is done uploading, select it and chose “extract”

After the extract, select the file “wp-config.php” right click on it and choose edit.

Editing the “wp-config.php”, you can see the changes that needs to effect.

Now type the url on your browser. Congrats, the website is now live and visible to the whole world now.

This is the end of the basic training on how to design a website using WordPress. Thanks for reading. Use the comment section below to ask questions if any.

Thank you for reading