Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day But This Website Was

When I went to bed last night I promised myself that I’d have this website ready for launch by Monday morning. So I had two days to do it.

I’d already started working on it late Wednesday, then all day Thursday before totally wrecking later that night by installing a plugin that corrupted the database.

It was easier just to delete the entire install and start from scratch as I knew it was going to be buggy. On a new project it’s not worth the hassle.

So start fresh I did on Friday but I just wasn’t feeling it and so before bed I hit the big red delete button again. Another fresh install that I didn’t touch until this morning.

Then I got down to business. Here are the initial steps to get a few essentials in order before starting on the theme and design.

Login To WordPress Dashboard

PAGES >> ADD NEW PAGE >>

Add Title – Home

Publish (not draft)

Also added pages for Contact, About, Privacy Policy & Advertise

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POSTS >> CATEGORIES >>

Add New Category

Name
Slug
Description

Added all categories from list

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SETTINGS >> READING >>

Your homepage displays
A static page – Home

SETTINGS >> PERMALINKS >>

Custom Structure
/%category%/%postname%/

Category base
.
Tag base
blank

Save

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PLUGINS >>

Installed

All in One SEO
Classic Editor

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EDIT PROFILE

Nickname (required)
Display name publicly as

Contact Info >>
Added email, site and socials

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APPEARANCE >> MENU >>

Created 2 menus

1 for categories – Display location Header Menu (main)
1 for site pages – Display location Footer Menu

Drag & Drop into preferred order

Save Menu

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Now I had two options.

1) Install a theme and do the design and layout.
or
2) Start adding content.

Doing the design work on a site like this without posts is pointless but creating content without the theme taking care of little things like generating the correct post thumbnails for the layout is a headache later so I installed the theme then started creating posts tinkering only here and there with the layout to make sure I had all my design ducks in a row.

Four hours later I decided I didn’t want to use the theme I’d selected. Certain elements were restrictive plus the mobile version was changing far too much for my liking so I swung the axe.

First theme deleted, next choice installed. A little bit of tinkering here and there then it was back to creating content.

I should point out that both themes I selected I have used before. As for WordPress itself, that must be almost 20 years I have been using it and built hundreds of sites which should explain why I’m knocking off some of these tasks in jig time.

Another bunch of content added, the categories reshuffled twice, descriptions added for search engines and a few tweets to the AIO SEO plugin while I was at it.

It is now 23.31 and time to hang up the mouse until morning when I need to keep adding content before finishing off the homepage layout and create the sidebars.