WordPress Installation and Tutorial

Having worked in web development and helped hundreds of people to get their websites online over a period of more than 15 years, I am ideally placed to be able to help you make your first steps online.

I concentrate on providing technical support these days, so while I don’t have the time to develop a whole website for you, I can recommend the WordPress system and find that it does most of what most people need.  Certainly to begin with, when you just want to get something online and to be able to do it quickly, WordPress is a great system that will help you publish details of your products and services online.

This website, digitalred.com, is based on WordPress, as are these websites below – examples I post for you to browse through to see the variety possible through WordPress based websites.

  • Dog in a Bag – www.doginabag.co.uk
    • Timothy was my own dog, a King Charles Spaniel, who went everywhere with me for years. As he got older he couldn’t walk very far so rather than leave him at home when I went out to work, I carried him around in a jute shopping bag: he loved it. He got to go to lots of places he’d never otherwise have seen, and people loved to see him in his bag on the train or out on the street. We would sometimes hang his bag somewhere and take a photo of him if we went somewhere interesting – and eventually put hundreds of those photos online. WordPress is running the website, sorting the photos into date order and showing thumbnails and the description of each one.
  • Pitchcoach www.pitchcoach.co.uk
    • Michael Parker spent over 30 years in the competitive pitching world of advertising, many with Saatchi and Saatchi where winning The National Lottery, as an account, was a pitching milestone. For the last six years he has developed his coaching skills advising major professional service firms on pitching successfully.  He blogs regularly with topical posts on his WordPress-based website.
  • Hard Rock Flooring – www.hardrockflooring.co.uk
    • Hard Rock Flooring sells high quality porcelain tiles and a selection of natural stone for floor and wall coverings.  With a showroom just outside Aylesbury, they use their website to showcase some of their porcelain products and to list the natural store that is currently available.  Their WordPress website is updated with showroom opening times and the shows or industry events that Hard Rock will be attending.  Created nearly from scratch the WordPress website replaced a static site that couldn’t be edited, and was expanded with many additional product photos and extra pages.
  • GWS Roofing www.gwsroofing.co.uk
    • A family business with an office in Middlesex and three locations in Central London, GWS Roofing specialises in the construction or replacement of all kinds of roofing for buildings. They pride themselves on the high quality service and advice they offer, with most of their work coming from recommendation. Their WordPress based website was created externally before we worked together to significantly update and expand it with many new pages and extra information.
  • The Beauty of Weybridge – www.thebeautyofweybridge.com
    • This website used to be based on Joomla and had been used by a Weybridge beauty salon for some time, but they found it difficult to administer and wanted something easier to manage.  I helped The Beauty of Weybridge to switch to WordPress by making a duplicate of their Joomla website in WordPress without interrupting the live public website, helped the staff learn how to update the new site, and switched over the websites without their customers noticing.
  • Eliza Parker Art – www.elizaparkerart.com
    • Eliza worked in the world of advertising for 30 years and has now taken up painting and has studios in Provence and London where she paints people, landscapes, and works with collage – painting with paper.  Using WordPress she has started demonstrating some of her work in galleries and is inviting other artists to join her in France next summer.
  • Manor Englishwww.manorenglish.co.uk
    • Manor English is based in Ruislip Manor and provides one-to-one lessons in English for adults seeking to learn or improve their spoken and written English.  With the ability of being very flexible and giving plenty of  opportunity to use practical English in real-life situations, Manor English is popular with people from all over the world.
  • PAHT www.paht.eu
    • Parliamentarians Against Human Trafficking are a European project promoting and strengthening a network of Parliamentarians against trafficking in human beings throughout all EU member States.  The website is updated frequently, with WordPress providing the ability to make quick and easy changes.
  • Estmat – www.estmat.co.uk
    • Michael is a qualified, Alternative & Complementary Health Care Therapeutic Practitioner.  He helps people with back pain.  I helped him with his website: he “just wants a website”, so we listed the things that he wanted to say, found some pictures that help illustrate it, he wrote the words and I showed and taught him how to stitch them together in WordPress.  After the initial installation help, he now maintains the website on his own.

If you’d like me to help you get your own WordPress website online, I can usually do it the same day.  I can register or transfer your  domain name, arrange some website hosting, configure a database, install WordPress, install some basic plugins, add some content, and spend time with you over the phone to choose a theme and explain how you can add information and pictures to your website.  Allow £200 if starting from scratch, and we’ll have you online and maintaining your own website in no time.