Lisa Butler

3 ways to create your site with WordPress

As I’ve mentioned before, despite my previous HTML and CSS experience, when I first started learning WordPress, I was totally lost. There are just as many ways to use WordPress as there are people who use it. Today I want to simplify it to 3 main ways you can create your site with WordPress depending on your skill level and budget.


There are a lot of ways to build a site on WordPress and here are 3 simple ways.
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1. Tweak an existing theme.

Think of this like renting an apartment. Everything is built for you, and you just bring in your own furniture and decor, and maybe paint the walls to make it your own.

If you have limited coding skills and/or budget, your best bet is to find a theme that closely matches what you want and add graphics and maybe change a little CSS to make it your own.

While you can make major changes to an existing theme, you typically don’t know what you’re getting into until you just dive in. Everyone codes differently, and many themes aren’t built with adaptability in mind — and also are not well documented for people who do want to make changes.

2. Hire a web designer to build your site for you.

Think of this like building a custom home. You choose the layout and finishes, and someone else puts it all together for you.

As you might expect, this is the most expensive option. But in the end, you get a site that’s perfectly tailored to your needs and a very cohesive part of your brand. This option is best if you’ve been in business a while and are ready to invest to take your site to the next level. You’ll get the best results if you have a clear understanding of how your site fits in with your brand and what you want your site to accomplish.

The downside is that since the site is custom coded to you, there won’t be documentation to help you make changes in the future. However, at that point you’ll likely only want to make copy changes moving forward, and a good developer can make that easy for you to do on your own without digging into code.

3. Build a child theme on a framework.

This is like buying a home — what you can do can really vary based on your needs, abilities, and budget. Maybe you only want to paint the walls. Or maybe you want to knock a wall down and put another one up somewhere else.

A framework provides the basic structure — the header, a container with the content and sidebar, the footer, and maybe a few extras. You can either change how they look, or move them around. For example, a framework will already have a primary menu built in, maybe below the header. You could either change up the background and fonts and leave it at that. Or you could move that block of code above the header and make it stick to the top of the page. You could even add some code to that section for your social media icons. The benefit is that the basic functionality is already built in, so part of the work is already done for you (and you don’t have to learn PHP to do it!).

Popular frameworks are well documented with a community of users, so they are typically more user-friendly for the DIYer. With frameworks, it’s best to build what’s called a child theme to make any changes. A child theme references code from the framework, but the files are separate — that way when the framework developers update the original theme, your own customizations aren’t overwritten.

The downside of frameworks and child themes is that you do need at least some knowledge of code to work with them, otherwise you’ll likely end up with a very generic looking site.

If you’re the DIY kind who knows code but struggles to put it all together in WordPress, I created Code Create Now for you. I’ll be walking you step by step through the process of creating your own child theme on the free ThemeHybrid framework. Registration is now open if you’d like to learn more and join!

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