As stated in my previous post Ghost Website creation in <You tell me> minutes, the experience of building your first website can be very frustrating.

This is particularly true when we talk about WordPress site creation. Because of its popularity, there are many available templates and plugins to choose from, together with tons of unorganized documentation.

When I started to test it, I instantly felt overwhelmed with so many choices and resources, so I decided to create and share this roadmap that will guide entrepreneurs through the adventure of building their first blog website.

My advice is to avoid overthinking, begin with something simple, and then enhance it as you feel more comfortable with the tool.

After completing this guide, you will have:

• Configured your Hosting and Site Name.
• Installed and configured the WordPress platform.
• Designed your Homepage, About, and Contact Pages.
• Posted your first article.

What do you need?

• Credit card (USD 5 a month, considering the current Hosting prices).
• Name for your domain/website.
• Picture or Logo for your site.

What’s missing?

The following features are not described in this tutorial:

• Subscriber’s area
• Newsletter
• Any plugin-powered features
• Author photo

Even though I consider them fundamental for growing your blog, you still can progress without them at the beginning.

Contents

1. Buying a Hosting Plan and a Domain
2. Hosting Basic Configurations
3. Installing WordPress
4. Choosing a Theme
5. WordPress Navigation Overview
6. Name, Logo, and Site Picture Configuration
7. Configuring your Homepage
8. Configuring your About Page
9. Configuring your Contact Page
10. Publishing your First Post
11. Redirecting your Traffic to your Blog
12. Summary
13. Further work

Buying a Hosting Plan and a Domain

To install WordPress using the Self-Hosting option (that is outside https://wordpress.com/), you need to have a hosting plan that supports it. For this guide, I’ll use fastcomet.com as site hosting because it's the one that I chose for my site and supports a one-click WordPress installation. Many alternatives support WP.

It’s good to say that I’m not an affiliate of any of FastComet or WordPress.

Go to fastcomet.com, and click on Start now button.

Select the plan that best fits your needs. I chose the one in the middle because it allows me to have more than one site.

Now you need to define your domain name. The default extension is .com, and you need to pay an annual fee for it. Clicking on the extension will show you other options, some of which are free with your subscription (You have only 1 free domain included, even with the FastCloud Plus plan).

Select the extension, write your desired domain name, and click on USE THIS DOMAIN button.

If you are lucky enough, your desired domain is available. If it isn’t you will need to find another name and repeat the action.

A good way of finding domain names is domains.google, as it provides you with many similar options to the one that you entered.

Once you find an available name, you will see the following screen, where you need to add your information and payment method, and that’s it.

Your site is now created. You may need to wait for some time until your site address is updated on the different servers on the internet. They say it may take up to 2 days, in my case, it took less than 30 minutes.

Once this happens, you can open a browser and write your site name in the address bar. You will see the Welcome screen.

The first thing you may notice is that instead of having the padlock icon, your site has a warning stating that it is Not secure at the left of the address bar. This is because you haven’t installed the certificates yet. You will do that and other basic configurations in the next section.

Hosting Basic Configurations

Open a browser and go to fastcomet.com. Click on Client Login.

Enter your email and password, and hit log in.

Go to cPanel. You will need to enter your password again.

Installing SSL Certificates

This is required to have a more secure site.

In your cPanel, scroll down to Security section, and click on Lets Encrypt SSL.

In the Issue a new certificate section, find your domain and click on the +issue button.

Check the boxes for Add cPanel subdomains?** and include the Sub Alias (that will contain the alternative names for your domain).

Then click on the Issue button.

The following message will appear after a while, confirming that the certificate was correctly installed.

You can now enter your site by using https://<YOUR_SITE> (note the S at the end of HTTP) and the padlock icon will appear.

But this is not enough. Because if you just type your site address, you will be directed to the “insecure site”. To avoid this, you need to force every connection to be HTTPS.

Go to cPanel, click on Tools on the left panel, scroll down to Domains, and click on Domains.

Select Enable Force HTTPS Redirect in the combo box, if it is not already selected.

Turn on the Force HTTPS Redirect switch for your domain. You will receive a Success message.

In a new tab, go to your site, but without adding the HTTPS:// prefix. The padlock should appear now.

Creating Email Accounts

You can create email accounts that are @<YOUR_SITE>. These accounts will be useful to have the different areas of your site organized (sales, contact, social media, etc.). I use one of these accounts for linking to the WP installation.

Go to cPanel > Tools > Email section, and click on Email Accounts.

Click on Create button.

Select your Domain, Username, and Password, and hit the +Create button.

Your email was created. You can check it by accessing webmail.<YOUR_SITE>.

Note that for accessing the HTTPS version of the webmail, you need to explicitly type it in the address bar. There are more complex configurations that can be done in cPanel to automatically redirect the webmail too, but this would be a topic for a different article.

You are ready to install and configure the Ghost application on your website.

Installing WordPress

Login to your Fast Comet cPanel.

Open the WP Toolkit. This can be done directly from the shortcut on the left panel, or you can scroll down until Domains and click on WP Toolkit on the right panel.

Fill in your data in the popup and hit Install.

A popup will appear informing the installation progress.

If everything went fine, a Success popup will appear. The popup is also prompting whether you want to install any Plugins. As we are not going to install any plugins in this guide, just click on No, thanks.

You can now see your WP installation in the list. And you can visit your site (Open button) or configure it (Log in button). Click on both buttons, it will open 2 new tabs.

From now on, you will be using the address that appears in the Dashboard address bar to administer your site configurations and content.

For accessing your site (as a visitor), just type <YOUR_SITE>/<DIRECTORY> in the browser's address bar.

The black bar on the top of the screen appears only because I'm already logged in in another window. But it won't appear for your visitors.

Choosing a Theme

The first thing that we are going to do is to choose a Theme.

I see the WP Theme as the toolbox that you have to create your website. Different themes have different customization options, flexibility, and components that can be displayed on your pages.

There are free and paid themes. Even the free ones have some paid components and options. And as there are so many of them, it is very hard to make your choice.
Let's choose the Kadence, for now. There are a lot of things that you can achieve with it for free.

In the Dashboard, go to Appearance > Theme, in the left panel.

You see here the ones that you have installed, and the one that you have active (in this case it is Twenty Twenty-Three).

Click on Add New button.

Search for kadence. When it appears, hover with the mouse on it and click on Install.

Once it is installed, click on Activate to make it your theme.

The theme was activated. With the success message, you will be offered to install the starter templates plugin, which we are not doing in this guide.
You are ready to go to the next section and have an overview of the WP navigation and options.

WordPress Navigation Overview

You are not going to do anything in this step but just familiarize yourself with some of the options that you have here.

You can always go back to the Dashboard by clicking on the WP logo on the top-left corner of the screen or typing the Dashboard URL in the browser address bar. If you log out, you will be prompted to introduce your administrator user and password (the ones that you defined when installing the WP) to access the Dashboard the next time.

In this guide, we are only focusing on the following menu items:

Posts - For managing and creating your posts.

There is only 1 post, for now (Hello world!)

Pages - For managing and creating every page that is not a post (About, Contact, etc.)

You will create an About and a Contact page later.

Appearance - For customizing the theme layout, colors, menus, and general settings.

In this option, you will use:

• Customize, for general customizations and layouts.
• Kadence, for documentation and help. We are not covering it in this guide, but it may be useful when you are beginning to enhance your site on your own.

Name, Logo, and Site Picture Configuration

You are going to configure the Site Name, Logo, and Picture (the one that appears in the browser tab) in this step.

Go to the Dashboard > Appearance > Customize.

The following screen will appear.

To go back to the Dashboard, you can close this screen by clicking on the "X" in the top-left corner.
On the right panel, the website preview is shown, with the Page name, the existing post, and a link to the Sample Page in the top-right corner.

For changing the Logo, Title, and Browser icon, go to Header, and then to Logo.

There you can upload the Logo, choose the Logo Layout (I chose to show only the Logo, as I'll configure the Homepage to show the title below), and also upload the Site Icon. You will see the right panel updated with your changes.

Hit on Publish button to save the changes.

Configuring your Homepage

First of all, you need to have a draft or idea of what you are going to display on your homepage. This is the one that I created for this guide.

It is not relevant at this point if the site that you build doesn't look exactly like the draft that you created. But having an image in your head helps you in the building process.

In this template, you will see:

• Logo (already configured in the previous step)
• Top-right Menu with About, Contact, Search, and Social Media icons
• Page Title
• Latest posts

Top-right Menu

This is how your page should look now. So you need to remove the Sample Page and create the About and Contact pages. Just create simple pages for now, without content. You will go back to them later.

In the Dashboard, go to Pages. You will see that there is a draft page for Privacy Policies and the Sample Page.

Click on Add New button to create the About page and then do it again for the Contact page.

For the About page, set "About" as the title and type some text. Then click on Publish. A confirmation prompt will appear on the right panel and hit Publish again. For going back to the pages list, click on the top-left icon.

Same thing for the Contact page.

The new pages appear now. You need to delete the Sample Page by selecting it and clicking on Trash.

Go to Appearance > Customize to see how the Homepage looks now.

About and Contact links already appeared there.

To add the Search Bar and the Social Media Icons, go to Header, on the left panel.

On this page, you see:

The available elements are in the left panel. The right panel (at the bottom) contains the 3 rows that you can configure for the header. You see there the Logo at the left and the Primary Navigation (About and Contact links) at the right of the main row.

To add new elements, click on the desired section (red circle) and a popup will appear. You will choose the Search item first and then the Social item.

Now everything is there. And the added items appeared also in the left panel so you can configure them. Go to the Social menu to add your links, and change the social networks that are displayed.

Go to Set Social Links and type your links. In my case, I'll only use Twitter.

When you are done with the links, hit Publish.

Go back (you may need to go back twice and enter in General > Header again). Remove or add Social Networks according to your needs.

For removing, drill down the Social Network and click on Remove Item. For adding, click on the Add Social + button. Then hit Publish.

I'll keep only Twitter.

The header looks like the template. You can test it by going to <YOUR_SITE>/<DIRECTORY> and you can check that the links are working.

Page Title

Go to Posts/Pages Layout on the left panel.

As your Homepage will contain the Latest Posts, go to Archive Layout.

Activate the Show Archive Title? switch. The title will appear.

To change the title's background, go back twice (to Customizing) and enter the Colors & Fonts Menu.

Go to Colors.

And change the Title Above Content Background color. Then hit Publish.

Latest Posts

The Homepage shows the Latest Posts by default in the Kadence Theme. To check it, go to the theme configuration > Homepage Settings.

In the radio button Your homepage displays, the option Your latest posts should be selected.

Configuring your About Page

You already created your About Page in the previous section. But you haven't included your content, yet. So let's do it now.

Go to your Dashboard > Pages, and click on the About page.

This is how your About page should look now.

Delete the text that you previously created ("This is the About page").

Every content in a WP page should be created inside a block. So a page is a set of different blocks. Each block will contain a type of content (Text, Image, Table, etc.). So when you insert a block, you need to specify the block type. And each type has its configurations, which are displayed on the right panel (Block tab).

To insert blocks to your page, you can either:

• Toggle the Block Inserter by clicking on the blue + icon in the top-left corner.
• Type a slash (/) while you are writing inside a block.
• Click on the + icon on the right of the block.
• Click on the + icon that appears when you hover the mouse below the last block.

Let's create a page with an image on the left, text on the right, and the body below them. To achieve it, add a Column block, by typing a slash and selecting Columns from the dropdown menu.

Select the 33/66 proportion, so it will generate a smaller column and a bigger one.

Click on the left block and add an Image.

Upload your picture.

Your image will be uploaded.

To add the text on the right column, click on the + Icon, and select Paragraph.

Write a quote, and then convert the block to a quote by clicking on the Paragraph icon and selecting Quote.

Go to the right panel. In the Block tab, you can customize the selected block. Set the text to Large.

Select your picture and make it rounded, by changing its property on the right panel.

Write your content, format it, and you can Preview your page or Update it with the buttons on the top-right corner.

Now you can go to your page (<YOUR_SITE>/<DIRECTORY>), click on the About link, and you will see the page you created.

Configuring your Contact Page

Similarly to the About page, go to your Dashboard > Pages, and select the Contact page.

Type your contact information. To add a hyperlink, select the text and click on the Link icon.

After finishing with your changes, click on Update, in the top-right corner of the screen.

You can go to your site, click on the Contact link and check how it looks.

Publishing your First Post

The editor for the Posts is the same one used for the rest of the pages.

In this case, you need to go to the Dashboard > Posts. And click on the Add New button.

Once creating the Post, type its Title and edit the content.

The posts contain the same Blocks structure that you saw on the About and Contact pages.

Additionally, you should set a Category, Feature Image, and Excerpt on the right panel (Post tab). These fields will be visible on your Homepage as characteristics of your article.

When you are done, hit Publish.

You will be asked to double-check and prompted about the Visibility, Publishing date, and suggested any other field that you haven't filled. Hit on Publish again.

You can now go to <YOUR_SITE>/<DIRECTORY> and see that the new post appeared on the Homepage.

You can open the post by clicking on it.

And this is how it will be displayed.

Redirecting your Traffic to your Blog

As you may notice, if you try to access your site directly (without including the Directory where you installed the WordPress), you still go to the Fastcomet Welcome Page.

To change that, you will redirect the traffic from the Fastcomet cPanel so whenever some visitor goes to <YOUR_SITE>, they are directed to <YOUR_SITE>/<DIRECTORY>.

Go to cPanel, scroll down to Domains, and click on Redirects.

Select:

• Type: Permanent.
• Your site from the Combo Box.
• Leave the next field blank (because you want to redirect the root directory).
• Redirects to: https://<YOUR_SITE>/<DIRECTORY>

Then hit Add.

A Success message will be displayed.

Going back, the new redirect will appear on the list.

And you can access your WordPress Blog by typing only the name of your site.

Summary

Congratulations. Your Website is Live, and you can start posting and sharing your ideas.

You have:

• Created your domain.
• Configured your hosting.
• Created your blog.
• Published your first post.

Further Work

We have covered the basics to create your Blog using WordPress in this article.

But as you may have noticed while going through this guide, there are many configurations and alternatives that the tool offers that weren't analyzed here.

Some of them are:

• Creating a Members' area and Newsletter.
• Adding a Profile picture for the authors.
• Investigating the Edition options.
• Installing and testing new Plugins.
• Learning HTML and CSS to enhance your site and posts.