There are a few mistakes that many people make when setting up and adding to their websites. Here are the most common missteps to avoid.
Choosing the wrong platform
If you have chosen one of the more popular providers like WordPress, make sure you choose the one that’s right for your needs.
Choosing the wrong writing style
Research has shown that people spend little time reading website content. They land on your page, scan it for anything interesting, and unless you can grab their attention quickly, they’ll move on to something shinier.
Keep your writing simple, direct, and easy to scan.
Too much detail
If you have too much detail on your web pages, people will lose interest and move on to your competitors. Keep messages short, simple, and easy to understand. Think of what you want your customer to know about your business right away.
Too busy
The last thing your website needs is too many graphics, photos, GIFs, or videos. Keep your web design simple and uncluttered.
Publishing incomplete pages
Don’t hit the publish button until you’re 100% happy for a page to go live.
Check and re-check in preview mode until it looks right, has no spelling or grammatical errors, the images are the right size, and communicates what you want your customer to know.
Not doing your website housework
New website owners tend to forget two of the most important bits of housekeeping:
doing regular backups
keeping their website and any themes and plug-ins updated
These two tasks are vital to protect your data against hackers, your human error, or power failures.
Best WordPress Plugins for Newbies
WordPress has close to 50,000 free and premium plug-ins available for the new website owner.
Several plug-ins will reduce your workload and maximize the functionality of your website.
Here are some of the plug-ins experts recommend for every website.
Yoast SEO or All-In-One SEO
Search engines are the major source of traffic for every website, and both Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO guide you through improving your web content to make it as search friendly as possible.
VaultPress
VaultPress is a security plugin built to create real-time automated backups for your website. It syncs all your website files and protects them from web attacks.
Social Icons
Having a social media presence is vital. Arguably, you can’t do business now without it.
Social Icons is a free WordPress plugin that displays the most popular social icons on your website from Facebook to Pinterest and more than 100 other social media platforms.
Wordfence Security or All-In-One Security and Firewall
Both will scan for known issues and alert you to potential problems like weak passwords, faulty plug-ins, and other vulnerabilities. If it detects a problem, it will suggest what action to take.
Akismet
Spammers are the scourge of the internet. Akismet will automatically filter out spammy comments and prevent them from ever appearing on your site. If a comment is blocked accidentally, you can go in and manually review and approve it.
WooSidebars
WooSidebars allows you to have as many sidebars and widgets on your web pages as you want.
WP Smush
A good website has graphics and photos as well as text. But newbies can often fall into the trap of having images that are too big that slow down their websites and take their potential customers with it.
WP Smush is an image compression plug-in that will resize and optimize your images for speed automatically.
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is a great housekeeping tool that automatically removes unnecessary data from your website.
WP-Optimize will free up your space by cleaning up spam and unapproved comments, trash posts, comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks.
When you decide to build a website and you are considering a blog, you will often read about some technical terms and jargon which do not make sense to you at the time.
These are some of the Basic Terms and brief explanations.
Posts (Dynamic Entries)
Posts are one of the first menu items you may notice when you install WordPress or go about researching it.
WordPress was meant to be a blogging system and that is why the term posts were used to mean regular entries or dynamic entries.
A post is like a separate entry on a separate topic. It is stored and may also be displayed with the Date, Time, and Author details. It is more like a diary entry that can appear on your blog’s home page and can inform people about the latest news.
Pages (Static Content)
Pages are similar to posts, the only difference being that pages are more static in nature. They contain information that does not change much, like an “About Us” page or a “Contact Us” page which may rarely change, once they are created.
Pages cannot be tagged or categorized as posts can.
Tags (Keywords)
Tags are small words or phrases which can be used to identify or categorize the post.
Multiple tags can be used to identify posts. Tags allow the post contents to be identified by special keywords which aid in searching the blog or also for SEO purposes.
Tags are optional and do not need to be applied to every post.
Widgets (Common Software)
Widgets are small pieces of pre-written software that can be placed in the sidebars of your blog. Widgets can be moved around and rearranged. They can also be removed completely.
Widgets allow you to use some pieces of commonly used software: like stat counters, recent posts, archives, and the latest posts on your blog.
Plugins (3rd Party Add-ons)
Plugins allow you to install more software to enhance the functions and performance of your blog, without affecting the core WordPress files.
Plugins are both free, while many premium plugins require purchasing.
Plugins are not part of the built-in WordPress features. They are optional pieces of software that can be used as per your needs.
Plugins are analogous to automobile accessories.
WordPress is an excellent option for starting up a new website.
Figuring out WordPress doesn’t take much time once you have got the hang of it. You can always visit the WordPress website and go through their online tutorials too.
May 30th, 2023 | 
Author: 
Posted in WordPress
