Build a WordPress website by yourself using “How To WP Tips” tutorials for beginners

Are you a beginner developer making first steps in WordPress web development? Or you already have some web development experience but still fell you got a lot to learn? The How To WP Tips website is here to help you on your way. In this article we included all our tutorials needed to build a WordPress website by yourself. We arranged our WP tutorials from the initial steps in building a WordPress website to visual styling and advanced functionality implementation. Good luck on your way to become a professional web developer.

Initial tutorials on how to build a WordPress website

Assuming that you successfully registered a domain and bought a hosting account, the first step to build a WordPress website is of course installing the WP system. We got you covered with our detailed WordPress installation tutorial. The next step is to choose a reliable and fast starter theme. We tested the default WordPress themes to simplify your choice. Before you start developing your website, you should create and embed custom CSS style sheets. We got a beginner tutorial covering that topic too.

• Install WordPress in cPanel tutorial
• Default WP themes loading speed test
• Embed custom CSS style sheets into WordPress tutorial

When you begin to build a WordPress website it’s important to set up your working environment efficiently. That way you’ll facilitate and speed up your web development process. Web development usually takes at least some coding. Therefore, we suggest you use a code highlighter that will add colors to the WP code editor and give it a clearer visual appearance. Installing a WordPress File Manager would also be a good idea. It will speed up your work eliminating the need to use cPanel file manager or FTP client for theme files management. In this early phase of building a WordPress website would be a good practice to disable the comments, unless your project requires them. We got a disable comments tutorial ready to show you how to do it properly.

• How to highlight code in WP editor
• File Manager plugins for WordPress – Test and Review
• How to disable comments in WordPress tutorial

Before moving on and start to build a WordPress site structure and visual style, there’s one more good practice to learn. In your development process you’ll be probably showing the website to your client, and make requested changes frequently. Since web browsers cache CSS files, your client might not see any modifications without clearing his browser cache. We have a tutorial that will show you how to avoid the browser caching issue:

• How to clear CSS cache and prevent browsers from caching CSS files

Learning new skills doesn’t have to be a tough job. Here at HowTo WordPress Tips we’re doing our best to make our tutorials easily understandable for beginners and first time WP users.

How to build a WordPress website structure

The structure of a website is a invisible grid containing various elements and content, together with all the elements themselves. Nowadays is possible to visually build a WordPress website structure only by drag and dropping. There is a choice of page builders that will allow you to create your website structure with no coding at all. We prefer to build the site structure by coding, firstly because of absolute control and freedom that comes with it. Of course, it takes some time and experience to master website coding, but once you master it you will build websites faster and better than with any page builder. Therefore, our How to build a WordPress website tutorials are primary intended for coders.

The website structure is in many cases composed of div grids. Therefore, firstly we’ll show you how to build perfectly aligned grids using the float and clear technique. Your div grids will in many cases contain images. We’ll show you how to create a CSS photo cropper and not worry about photo proportions when adding them to the website. While you build a WordPress website structure and content layout, you’ll be surely frequently use HTML lists. We have a couple of tutorials that will teach you some less known HTML list tricks.

• Create a div grid using the n-th child clear technique
• How to create a CSS photo cropper
• How to split HTML lists into columns
• Aligning HTML list items vertically
• Change ordered list starting number or reverse the number order

The previous website structure tutorials required basic HTML & CSS knowledge. Now let’s move a bit further and start editing theme files PHP code. To build a WordPress website structure sometimes will require to add more sidebars or widget areas than it’s provided in the theme by default. Occasionally, you’ll need to display your featured images on custom positions other than the theme’s default position. There will also be cases when you’ll want to display specific elements only on the home page and not on sub pages (or vice versa). Our following tutorials will help you completing those tasks.

• How to register sidebars and add widget areas to WP websites
• Displaying the WordPress featured image tutorial
• Using the is_front_page and is_home functions in WordPress

Styling the visual appearance of WordPress websites

When it’s about visual styling of the website, our CSS tutorials will help you make your website stand out from the mass by it’s look. There are also useful plugins available for certain aspects of visual styling of WP websites. When you build a WordPress website, it’s visual appearance will largely rely on your design creativity. There will be cases when it will be a tough job to transform your visual design into code. Our styling tutorials will help you getting as closer as possible to it.

We already covered structuring HTML lists earlier, now we’ll show you some tricks how to make lists stand out visually from standard boring lists. Changing website text color is quite simple, but did you know that you can color any text into beautiful gradients? Our text color gradient tutorial will show you how to do it and we’ll even give you some CSS code examples to modify according to your needs. Speaking of website text, when you create a WordPress website make sure not to forget adjusting the text selection color according to the website color palette.

• How to change HTML list’s bullet points color and shape?
• Text color gradient tutorial
• Text color gradient examples
• Customize selected text color tutorial

A trick that will make your website stand out for sure is creating a custom browser scrollbar. We’ll teach you how to design and style an eye catching scrollbar, either by coding CSS or with help of a dedicated plugin. Another cool visual enhancement is customizing the browser address bar color on mobile phones according to your website colors. The trick is quite simple and we’ll show you how to do it.

• Customizing the browser scrollbar with CSS tutorial
• Custom browser scrollbar WordPress plugins – Tests and reviews
• How to customize the address bar color on mobile browsers?

More tutorials on how to build a WordPress website by yourself

In this article we covered only the initial tutorials that will help you to build a WordPress website. Those basic tutorials are suitable for beginners starting their web developer careers. In the next article we’ll move a bit further and give you more cool tips on WordPress website development. If you felt comfortable going trough the previous tutorials and successfully completed them, now you are ready for our intermediate level tutorials. Stay tuned.