Freelancing with WordPress -Part 1
Hello dear reader, I assume that you're here because you’re interested in learning about freelancing with WordPress or you are searching for advice on freelancing for small to medium businesses. If so this article is just for you. In this series of articles, I will be going over the basics that you need to know before choosing WordPress as a CMS for your next project.
In this article, I will be going over the following topics:
What is WordPress
WordPress is an open-source website and CMS creation tool written in PHP. In a non-Chinese way, its probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and content management system - (CMS) that exists today.
As a slogan, working with WordPress can be easy as playing with lego, in lego, you can build a house by connecting lego parts together and its the same concept with WordPress, however instead of lego parts, you connect plugins and themes to each other.
What can you build with WordPress?
- Blog or Personal Website
- Business Website
- eCommerce
- Non-Profit and Religious Websites
- Portfolio Websites
- Online Communities
- Coupon Website
- Multilingual Websites
- Wiki Sites Like Wikipedia
- Photography Websites
For more information on what you can build using WordPress check out this article by justlearnwp.
Different ways to work with WordPress
WordPress give you freedom, you have the choice of using pre-existing extensions called plugins with a pre-existing theme. Or you can develop your own theme with either using some of the pre-existing extensions or you can write the extension yourself.
Using a pre-built theme
Before checking a theme write down the list of features that your freelancing website should have. You don't want to choose a theme that doesn't have what you are looking for.
As a person that doesn't want to write code, you can go to websites like Theme Forest and search for a theme that suits your needs, purchase, download and activate the theme on your WordPress website, import the demo data, and start customizing the contents of your site.
How to choose a theme
Each theme provides a demo link on what the website would look like but before going to check the demo you should first check the following:
- The number of purchases, skip any themes that have had less than 100 purchases.
- The rating of the theme, a theme with a rating of 3 or below will probably have some issues.
- Check the comments section of that theme and check how long the author usually takes to respond to a comment.
- Check the last updated date of the theme, a theme that hasn't been updated from 1 year would probably not be the theme that you are looking for.
After filtering the themes depending on the above criteria now go and the check the theme's demo and compare its features with the features that you previously wrote down. The theme that you want to choose should cover 80% of the features that you need.
Using a customized theme
To build your own customized theme you should know a bit of PHP and a bit about the WordPress theme system.
To refresh your memory on PHP check this free tutorial from Laracast https://laracasts.com/series/php-for-beginners.
To refresh your memory on WordPress custom theme, check the following tutorial https://www.taniarascia.com/developing-a-wordpress-theme-from-scratch/.
When building your custom theme, I advise you to check the following resources:
- Advanced custom fields, a powerful plugin to add advanced custom fields into your WordPress site.
- WP Hasty, a code generator for WordPress.
Stay tuned for Part 2....... coming soon.
