Designing, Developing and Rolling out a new WordPress CMS website

Part two of our two part WordPress guide to supplement our existing WordPress design, development and installation articles.

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Developing the Website

Let’s begin this article with a Q&A of common problems some novices st

Q. How do I create a wp-config.php file?

A. This is when the WordPress installation script can’t create the file for you. It should however supply you with the code to paste in a file.

You can use notepad or notepad++ on Windows, else gedit on Linux, which are just a few text editors out of many you can use.

You paste the supplied code into the text editor, and instead of saving as a text file, which in many cases means deselecting .txt at the ‘save as’ stage, then selecting ‘all files *.*’ from a dropdown and finally typing in wp-config.php for the filename, including the php extension. umble into.

Q. How do I migrate my WordPress website to a live web host?

A. We’ve already covered how to move a WordPress website to another server before, which you should read. A key point of that guide, being to change the website name within the WordPress dashboard to the new location, before you move the website, else you will find you can’t access the WordPress dashboard once you’ve moved the website.

Q. Should I place the WordPress CMS in a sub-directory called blog?

A. WordPress CMS is more than a blogging system, and you can have web pages also, with a home page being set to be the main page of the website, with a navigation error, and through the help of a plugin, you can exclude some pages from the navigation area, to help you not clutter the menus. It is always best to maintain one website, rather than two. Which means you shouldn’t to have the blog in its own directory, but part of a WordPress website that supplies both pages and blog posts.

Development Considerations

Development on WordPress is often different to development with other less mature content management systems. This is because there are thousands of plugins, that remove the actual need to code features yourself or hire someone to code them for you.

However that being said, it is sometimes required to implement code that doesn’t come in the form of a WordPress plugin.

A google example is Google’s translation code, to make your website readable to people who don’t understand the language of the website.

This short piece of html code can be placed within a text widget.

Another good example is running code for a specific page. You could choose to place this code within the php for the specific page or post, using the page or post editor within the dashboard.

Another option would be to place the code in the theme itself, and ask it to run a third party code based upon the url being accessed.

When possible avoid using too many plugins, as this could slow your website down, plus create issues with the automatic update of the website.

Conclusion

This short two page guide was aimed at novices and to supplement our existing content.

We hope it has pointed you in the right direction, saved you time and helps you move your website project forward.

However a better way to move your website project forward, is to hire Neogain to design and develop your website.

Our Hull based web design and development team can easily work with you to put together a website that meets your requirements.

Use our Hull web design and development team for your projects.