10 Perseverance

Perseverance — keeping at it on a regular basis, is the proven formula for making a successful website. If, at the outset, I gave you the impression that, in 24-hours you could have a successful website, then I was wrong. You can build a website that has the potential to become successful in a very short time. But getting it to the place where you are collecting tangible returns from your work and not just personal satisfaction is going to be a longer haul.

My recommendation would be to publish at least three posts during your first week, as well as doing at least two or three things that will give you backlinks. After that, probably once a week is the minimum amount of effort. Obviously, if you have the time and energy to write one or more new posts per day, you’ll get there even faster.

Someone recently told me that getting a new website well ranked in the search engines is a lot like chopping down a tree. There are many variable factors involved. How big and tough is the tree? How sharp is your axe? How hard and true can you chop? I hope that my website creation instructions will help you in choosing not only the right tools to use and the best way to use them, but also to locate the closest tree with the lowest-hanging fruit.

Structuring Your Website

Before you actually get working on your first website, I want to call your attention to the two basic building blocks of a WordPress site, Posts and Pages.

Posts are the articles that appear on your home page, with the most recent one at the top. They get filed into monthly archives automatically.

Pages are designed to stick around longer. The common use for them are for “About Us” and “How to Contact us” and “Our Privacy Policy” kind of things. But you are free to do with them whatever you like. I have chosen to use Pages to hold the primary content of this website, so each chapter appears with its page name in the menu bar. From time to time I may write most posts, such as providing greater detail on how to create, upload and change the permissions of those pesky XML sitemap files. But the primary features I want to make sure my visitors see right off the bat are those I’ve chosen to write as pages, not posts.

If I were a travel writer designing my first WordPress website, here are some of the things I would probably write as pages and not posts:

  • My brief biography, including my areas of specialization, awards or other honours I’ve earned, and how to contact me
  • Some of the best articles I’ve written, either as html files, links to PDF files, or links to online sources
  • And a page about the books I’ve written and how to buy them (or failing that, maybe books or other things I recommend and how to buy them).

At least once a week I’d write a blog post with a minimum length of 200-words, and certainly no more than 1,000. If I had an appropriate photograph to illustrate the story, I’d include one.

And that’s about it.

I am suddenly reminded of two more tips about WordPress I want to pass along, regarding importing text and photographs.

I had been using WordPress for more than a year before I learned about one of its features. I wasted countless hours prior to gaining this knowledge. The issue is pasting text from a Microsoft Word page into a WordPress page. Word adds all kinds of formatting codes that foul up other software programs. I found that the best way to compensate was to copy a page from Word, paste it into a simple text editor like Notepad, and then copy it from Notepad and paste it into WordPress. This eliminated all the problems.

Boy, was I stupid!

There is an easier solution already built into WordPress. Do you know what the icon on the left of the image below is called?

It’s called “Kitchen Sink” and if you click it, you’ll find another whole row of available tools that had previously been hidden. And one of them…

…lets you paste text directly from a Word document by stripping away all the conflicting coding automatically.

I tell you this for two reasons. The first is obvious, to save you time in pasting from Word to WordPress. The second is the more important lesson. WordPress is filled with a lot of very powerful tools and useful features. If you will be smarter than me, and take some time to poke around in all of its dusty corners, learning how to use it correctly, that will be time well spent. It will probably end up saving you many frustrating hours.

Thank you for visiting my website and reading this tutorial on how to build your own website quickly and easily. If you follow my instructions and run into a problem, please let me know. It’s very likely I goofed up somewhere, and I will put your question into a forthcoming FAQ page (not post.) Send your query to: info”at”buildawebsitetutorial.com.

One last thing. If you have found some of this information useful and valuable, you can show your appreciation by buying me a beer…


Cheers,
Robert the Webmaster