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How to build an artist website in WordPress
An artist website is the best way to brand, market and sell art. Fortunately, the task of making one takes merely ten minutes! WordPress is an easy-to-use tool for making web presence. It can be used for a website and not just a blog. It is also a complete content management system and is an easy way to build many different types of websites.
The following steps below will help you get your blog, or website, up and running quickly.
1. Hosting and Domain: The user is required to buy some hosting and a domain. Many hosting companies include a free domain on signing up. The buyer needs to look out for certain points: cost, reliability, support and package details. Bluehost is sufficient for a normal traffic. Their package includes a free domain, one-click install option for WordPress and unlimited storage for $4.95 a month.
2. Choosing a domain name: The name should be easy to remember and easy to spell. The length also matters as it may be misspelled by visitors. A Google search for similar items and their results should be ascertained. Whois.net can be used to see if domain name been registered already.
3. Installing WordPress: It includes two ways to install: Using Bluehost makes installing WordPress with just a couple of clicks by selecting ‘Automatically create a new database’. Different hosting platforms have a similar one-click install option for WordPress. cPanel hosting enables the user to install WordPress through an application called Fantastico Deluxe.
After logging in to hosting admin panel and locating the Databases section, a new database and user needs to be created by entering MySQL Databases. The user password should be complex to avert hacking. Adding the User to the Database gives full access privileges to a database.
After downloading WordPress software, the user needs to log in to web hosting through FTP client to connect to hosting and upload the WordPress files to the public_html folder.
4. Selecting a theme: Web design companies build completely custom WordPress themes from the ground up, customized in accordance with style, brand, and functions. There are thousands of WordPress themes, both free and premium. Portfolio2 – $35 by RayGun is an elegant, minimalist option for an artists' portfolio site. Simfo – $39 by Themify can handle videos as well as images. ShutterBug – $50 by Themezilla produces amazing, high-quality WordPress themes.
5. Installing WordPress theme: For installing theme the user needs to: Visit Appearance > Themes > Install Themes and select the .zip file. On the other hand, in case of FTP access is there with a server, the theme folder should be copied to http://www.yourname.com/wp-content/themes to activate. Various settings and configurations like adding a logo, color changing and layout may be done.
6. Adding content: Static pages as ‘About” and “Contact” and blog posts can be created. Menus can be created by visiting Appearance > Menus and dragging and dropping content into the navigation.
Pimping your artist website
Regular, fresh, and quality content is the SEO key. And, already the WordPress is SEO-friendly content management systems (CMS) which provide clean site structure, image optimization, clean code and other features. Still, the best plugins available to Optimize site, make it search-engine friendly, improve and protect rankings.
WordPress offers thousands of plugins which are mostly free. They can be added to the site to improve functionality or add new features. The user needs to go to Plugins to activate installed plugins. Recommend ones: Portfolio Slideshow, NextGEN Gallery, Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin and ShareThis.
Adding Google Analytics to website keeps an eye on a number of visitors. The end result is a professional-looking artist website built in WordPress, with own hosting and domain.
Yoast an ultimate SEO plugin
features include:
- XML sitemaps
- Content and page analysis tool evaluates focus keyword, density, title tags, meta description, outbound links, readability and content length
- Internal linking suggestions
- 404 URL's redirect manager (for those annoying 404 URLs)
- Focus keyword reports
Differentiating between WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla
Along with WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! are widely-used CMS. All are open-sourced and free to download and use.
Drupal is a powerful, developer-friendly tool ideal for building complex sites. It requires some expertise and experience to operate. Joomla! offers developer-oriented, extensive capabilities of Drupal and user-friendly but more complex site development options than WordPress offers. Its relatively uncomplicated installation and setup and a novice can create fairly complex sites after understanding its structure and terminology.
WP is very user-friendly and is great for non-technical users to quickly set up fairly simple sites. It’s easy to paste text from an MS-Word document into WordPress site, but not into Joomla and Drupal sites. WordPress is an easy-to-use blogging platform, with an ever-increasing catalog of themes, plugins, and widgets. Custom CMS provides maximum customization and can be designed to feature unique capabilities and design that benefits business. With custom CMS like Fuse, organization’s user requirements, classification, and tagging can be customized to match business. With open-source or commercial CMS, developers are limited by the rules of the CMS. Custom CMS can be altered to remove unnecessary features. Thus, less code is used and it is easier for developers to read, and the site load time is boosted. Hackers who understand how to attack WordPress sites have millions of options as all the code is available online for open-source CMS and tools. Custom CMS is usually developed in-house, and the code isn’t mass-distributed which leads to better security.