The website from the front end looks gorgeous! How do they do it? Today, without a website, you’re not relevant or legit. It’s a harsh judgment. Not everyone knows how to build a website. 

It’s possible when someone shows you how to.

How To

When you see how its done with tech stuff, you find out the tech guys best kept secrets. If they don’t want you to know then there won’t be a help menu and you’ll have to rely on them to do it for you. That’s not acceptable anymore. Maybe it was in the last decade. But now you have access to the how-to, at least on this blog you do.

If you’ve been on this website you’ll know that I’m in love with the one theme that teaches you how to do it for yourself. It’s the most advanced theme of it’s kind and here’s the big secret; the developers and designers also use it! It’s the Divi Theme made by Elegant Themes.

This article shows you how to with the Divi Theme. Building a website isn’t easy, if it was everyone would have done it and we’d be doing something else. It’s a complex set of components that must work together to create the website. But when you see the how-to in action then the complexity disappears and you can build a website yourself. We tend to think only a designer can design a website. This is not true, with the right tools you can design your website the way you want with built in settings inside the modules.

A website is a content management system and you can put into it whatever you need to function. WordPress is the ideal software for a website, it’s flexible and you can add functions to it as you need them. You will need a WordPress theme and the one I recommend is the Divi Theme. It’s the most versatile theme, and yes, it’s also for beginners and you don’t have to know how to code to use the Divi Theme.

The Theme Marketplace is jam packed with WordPress Themes, each one looks better than the last one you looked at. One theme isn’t better than another. It all depends on your willingness to want to create your website yourself, or have someone help you create it.

The Web Page

There are three parts to the webpage. The header, the body and the Footer bars.

The Screen

Content is viewed on different size screens. The Theme adjusts the content automatically to fit the screen size.

Enable the Theme Settings

After uloading the Divi.zip file you’ll need to go to the Theme Options area to enable the settings. Without doing this the theme won’t work. It might sound obvious but sometimes a setting not enabled can cause a problem. 

Divi Theme Options Area

Below is an image of the Divi Theme Options Settings section.

At first all the settings will read disabled. Click disable and the blue ENABLED button will appear. This tells you that you just enabled that setting. When you return to this area you won’t have to remember whether you did or didn’t enable the setting.

If you didn’t enable the setting it would be greyed out and read DISABLED.

Locating The Built In Help Access

There is a help menu built into each module. Open the module and locate the ? symbol at the bottom of the module. Click on the symbol and the Divi Builder Helper will open with a video tutorial of that module.  smile The video tutorial is published by Elegant Themes. This is exactly how I learned to use the Divi Theme when I first started using it when it came out in 2013. I would stop and start the video as many times as I needed. After a while I got it.

Did you know; no one knows how software works until they start using it?

Accessing Built In Help

When you click on the ? symbol the built in instruction video will open and you can watch the video. It is directly related to the module you’re using. In this example we’re looking at the Divi Toggle Module Settings Instruction Video.

Press the play button and the instructions will show you how to use the Toggle Module.

All of these videos are on Elegant Themes YouTube Channel. Inside the Divi Builder Helper you’ll see related articles to help you further. 

This is how I learned to use the Divi Theme.

Premade Layouts

One of the most helpful elements when creating a website is to use a premade layout. You can choose any layout and modify it to suit your idea. The layout is meant to be used as a guide.

There are 100+ Theme Layouts in the Divi Library and a new one is added each week, and there is no extra cost, they come with the Divi Theme.

Accessible Content

As technology advances so do the effects of what you can do with content on a web page. This text box flips when you hover your mouse over it!

Is the Content Accessible?

Everyone uses the web including people with disabilities. Make sure your content isn’t overly animated or decorated. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Even if it looks cool to you.

Acessibility

We tend to think everyone is the same as we are, but there are people with disabilities that access the web. You want to make sure your content is suitable. Keep it simple and clean with as minimal distractions as possible.

Animation on a web page attracts attention. It’s great when it’s subtle. Annoying when it’s overdone. The last thing you want to do is annoy the person visiting your website. They get off as fast as they can and don’t return.

Creating a Website is a Process

If there’s so much information about WordPress and creating websites, why is it so difficult to create one? It’s because the information isn’t presented from the how-to-do it’s presented from it’s easy and click here to get started. This is the number one reason why websites fail. The initial setup doesn’t follow the roadmap. Yes, you need a roadmap. It’s that much harder to get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going.

Bringing Your Idea Into the Website

The idea you have for your website has been living inside you. You might be fairly sure what you want. You will find a lot of readymade themes to use. This is fine if you know how to use the theme and there is sufficient documentation to help you if if you get stuck. 

The majority of WordPress Themes don’t have as extensive support as the Divi Theme offers you. This makes a big difference when you want to get your website going so that it works for your business project, or service. Before you settle on a theme you need to have two other elements first. The Domain Name and the Hosting Company in that order.

The Domain Name

This is the name of your website. Do the work and make sure the name you choose isn’t taken. Search the main database Whois.com to find out. If the .com extension isn’t available but the same name is available to use with .org – don’t use that name. It’s “confusingly similar” and will result in the company with the .com name coming to you and wanting to know why you are using their name.

The Hosting Company

The real information about them; some are good and some aren’t. Don’t go with cheap hosting. Before you sign up for web hosting find out what version the Host servers are running on. Those servers will host your website. You want to have sufficient memory and not have your website crash beause the Hosting Company doesn’t give you enough memory.

The Hosting Company should be on 7.0+PHP. This will accommodate the memory you need.

The version is based numbers. Software updates regularly. WordPress core and the WordPress Theme will update fixing bugs and adding new features. When there is an update you will see a series of numbers. For example: the WordPress core software updated current version is 5.3.2 – the next time WordPress core updates the version numbers will change to 5.3.3.

If a Web Hosting service only operates websites at 5.0 they won’t be compatible with the updated WordPress version of 5.3.3. Since all Web Hosting companies supply the WordPress core software they have to keep pace with WordPress core updates.

The Theme will also have version numbers. These are different from the WordPress core version numbers. The WordPress Theme you use should update regularly, not once a year when the license comes up for renewal. The Divi Theme is regularly updated and all you’ll have to do is see the notice in the Updates area and then press the Update button.

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