1. Consistency

Consistency is one of the most important qualities that your blog needs to develop that engaged following. Consistent publishing not only drives more traffic but also increases leads.

A recent HubSpot study found small businesses posting content more than 11 times each month had three times the visitors of sites publishing once monthly — and twice as many leads as businesses posting 6-10 times. An editorial calendar helps build a consistent publishing schedule and motivates you to stay on track.

2. Content Arcs

Compared to posting on whichever topic comes to mind, an editorial calendar is far more strategic. By planning out your content in advance, you can build a sense of progression that walks with customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey, while telling the story of your brand.

An editorial calendar will also allow you to build smaller content arcs into your strategy, such as a weekly interview or current events roundup. This kind of connected content will keep your readers returning so that they don’t miss an installment.

3. Future Flexibility

Along with structure, an editorial calendar also provides flexibility to your blog strategy. A content plan lets you see the larger picture, from now into the future, allowing you to more easily refine next week and next month’s content based on the results of past content.

You’ll quickly discover the topics that drive the most traffic and that most resonate with your followers. You can then adjust your future content pieces based on the content proven to be the most popular.

4. Tracking and Analysis

Naturally, in order to take advantage of insights from your content and your audience, you need to be tracking the performance of your content pieces. The specific metrics you track for your content should be based on your overall business goals, but in general, you should be paying attention to the content themes and individual posts that drive the most traffic.

Some editorial calendars also include built-in tools for promoting content on social media and tracking that engagement as well. An organized content and promotion schedule makes it easier to track and analyze your results.

5. Meeting Business Objectives

An editorial calendar also makes it easier to ensure that your blog content and practices are focused on meeting overall business goals. Digital marketing specialist Stacy Jackson suggests ranking each content idea for alignment with specific business goals. At the very least, you should be evaluating each topic for whether or not it will contribute to your marketing and organizational objectives.

Resources to Get Started

There are great benefits in adding an editorial calendar to your blogging strategy — and there are many tools available to help you get started with an effective calendar. HubSpot offers free digital editorial calendar templates that you can adapt for the specific needs of your blog or business, while CoSchedule provides a series of free printable worksheets for strategic planning, along with their flagship digital calendar.

To help you out further in building out your content base, check out our article on planning a year’s worth of content in just one day. These resources will help you quickly develop an effective blog and blogging process that will grow your audience.

Step 2. Build Your Nonprofit Website Yourself

Nonprofits stand to gain a lot by going the DIY route. Instead of paying a developer to create a site that you can’t manage without their assistance, using a CMS, or content management software, such as WordPress enables you to customize the look and feel, add features, and publish content on your own. We always recommend WordPress because of it’s flexibility and the hugely supportive community that has developed around it. With free resources, plugins that build upon your site with custom features, and a continuously improving interface for editing your website without code, it’s a perfect choice for a new nonprofit, or for upgrading an existing site that needs some love.

Follow these steps to get started with WordPress.

Website Hosting and Domain Name

One of the more confusing aspects of creating your own website is hosting and domains. Essentially, your website hosting company stores your website on secure servers and connects it to the internet, to be accessed by your users. Your domain name is the address that connects users to your site. Choosing a great domain name is as important as the rest of your branding, such as your name and logo, but it also needs to be memorable and easy to type. When you set up hosting, you can typically get a discounted or free domain name with your plan.

Install WordPress to Your Domain

After securing a domain name and a hosting plan, you’ll need to install WordPress. The WordPress core software enables you to create a website and edit it through WordPress’s admin dashboard. Using a WordPress theme and plugins, you can accomplish nearly anything a developer could, including responsive design, dynamic content and animations, and look and feel changes for your brand.

To install WordPress, all you need to do is access your hosting control panel, or cPanel, and locate the one-click WordPress installation button. Your host will handle the details, and will send you an email or notification with login credentials for your website’s WordPress dashboard. To access this dashboard any time, simply type in your domain address with /wp-admin added to the end of the url. For example: yoursite.com/wp-admin. Then enter the username and password, and you’re cooking with gas!

Choose a WordPress Theme

The next step requires you to choose a WordPress theme, or template. This piece of software gives you a baseline of features, styles, and layouts to customize without writing code. It’s kind of like using a Word document template, but much more in-depth and feature-rich. There are two basic types of WordPress themes: free and premium. Free themes are great for getting started, but if your goal is to have a professional website with up-to-date technology and design practices, you need to choose a premium theme. Most premium WordPress themes run around $59, which is a one-time fee and includes support and theme updates over time.

Premium themes also tend to be more focused in their set up and design, meaning that you can find a nonprofit specific theme with some great designs and features built-in.

Here are some great examples of niche nonprofit WordPress themes.

Install Your WordPress Theme and Import a Demo

Now, when you choose a WordPress theme, the next step is to install it on your website. So log in to your WordPress admin dashboard again, and follow this guide:

• How to Install Your WordPress Theme

Most niche themes for nonprofits feature a great demo design that follows the best practices for marketing your organization. These designs can be imported, and then all you have left is customizing your brand and content, and tweaking the design to meet your specific goals.

• Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
• Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Customize, Write, Refine

Once you’ve imported a demo, or created your own design using the theme’s features, you can now begin customizing colors, images, layouts, and writing copy for your site. Before too long, you’ll probably want to start adding some features with WordPress plugins (there are many free plugins that will help you add features and optimizations). In addition to the front-end marketing, you also need to consider the security and performance of your site, and set up some ways to track interactions. Here are some additional resources and guides to help you get started:

How to Find Quality WordPress Plugins

How to Install WordPress Plugins

How to Optimize Your Website’s Loading Speed

How to Protect Your Website and Set Up an SSL

How to Perform A/B Tests on Copy, Design, and Features

Step 1. Medium, Style, and Goals

Over years of creating websites, I’ve learned that a website with no goal in mind—no matter how inconsequential—isn’t useful at all. Also, the medium of your art is important to consider for choosing a WordPress theme and figuring out how you want to display your art as well.

The best answer is research. We looked into some examples of great visual art portfolio websites built with WordPress, and found some commonalities that seem to work best in the current trends.

Searchable Content

First, we found that many art websites, especially photography sites, have prominent search functions.

This makes a lot of sense in our day and age, with websites like Unsplash becoming the primary way to find stock photos. It also provides a much richer user experience with the ability to find exactly what interests you.

They key to doing this right is to have well-defined metadata and alt tags for the photos you upload, so that users can find them easily with their search terms. Adding alt tags and descriptions to images is a stock feature in WordPress. (Search functionality also comes with WordPress.)

Sorting Your Art by Category

Another built-in WordPress feature that many artists are taking advantage of is category sorting.

In this case, the artist has created their website using a basic WordPress blog feed, and provided links to categories above. It’s very easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, and makes browsing easier.

Many portfolio features, and portfolio-specific WordPress themes feature fancier ways to do this. You can easily create categories for specific media, series of work or projects, or even create collections that feature different themes or styles to showcase your versatility and interests.

Following and Shopping

If someone finds your art and falls in love, chances are they want more of it, and probably want to buy something. That’s why great visual art websites always feature social media links and either a link to buy art somewhere, or a built in store.

If you post your art on social media, you should have prominent social links, even at the top of the navigation as this artist does.

Also, why not sell your art yourself? Many great WordPress themes come ready to create an online store with complete functionality using the WooCommerce plugin. Here’s a video that explains how to set it up, if you choose to create a store.

Set Your Goals

What you want your website to achieve should determine how you design it and what features you’ll include. Think about what you are looking for, and try to translate it into features.

For example, if you want to sell art primarily, you may want to set up your site as a storefront, which displays your art like products. You don’t have to follow your goal so rigidly, of course, but it’s good to know what you want to get out of your site before you build it.

Step 2. Creating Your Art Website

If you have a goal in mind and some ideas about how you want to show your art, you’re ready to start building your art website. Follow these steps to get going.

Website Hosting and Domain Name

To build a website, you need a place to store it and a name/address for people to access it. This combination involves website hosting—a service that enables you to create a website on a secure server and connect it to the internet—and a domain—the address people type to access your site.

Website hosting companies, like Bluehost (the leader in WordPress hosting), provide hosting services and sometimes also domain names.

As an artist, you need to think about your medium, goals, and audience when choosing a domain name. For example, if you’re showcasing your work to build your name, you might consider yourname.com or yournameillustration.com, unless you already have a personal brand you’re working off of.

Install WordPress

Next, you need what’s known as a CMS, or content management software, to make changes to your website without writing code (unless you can code websites yourself). WordPress is the CMS of choice for many artists, and it powers nearly 30% of all websites.

WordPress is great for artists. It allows you to customize all aspects of the visual design, and the technical features, using your visual acumen. But you don’t need to know code or pay someone to do it. You can express yourself with your website without having to translate that to a developer.

The key to WordPress is that you start with a WordPress theme—a template. This theme includes many features and design elements you can use to create an amazing, responsive, up-to-date website. But first, you need to install the WordPress core software.

(Remember you need website hosting and a domain name before this step).

To install WordPress you simply need to find the one-click WordPress install button provided by most hosting companies. This will be found in your control panel, or cPanel, and it will only take a few seconds. Your host will then email you some log in credentials for WordPress. You can then sign in to your WordPress admin dashboard—where you’ll customize your site and create content—by accessing your domain with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a WordPress Theme

Because WordPress is open-source, there are millions of themes to choose from, and it’s easy to get stuck down a rabbit hole. The key to choosing your WordPress theme is finding the best design to start with, matched with the best features, responsiveness, and cleanest code. There are both free and paid WordPress themes (otherwise known as premium themes).

Premium WordPress themes include the most customization, best features, and cleanest up-to-date code, as well as dedicated developer support and updating. Free WordPress themes can work, but there are often too many limitations.

To help you get started, check out these great portfolio WordPress themes, or browse multipurpose themes for more options.

Install Your WordPress Theme and Import a Demo

Now, when you choose a WordPress theme, the next step is to install it on your website. So log in to your WordPress admin dashboard again, and follow this guide:

• How to Install Your WordPress Theme

If your WordPress theme came with one or more demo designs that align with your goals, this is a great way to save time and build a quality site without reinventing the wheel. Once your design is imported, you can still customize it and change anything you don’t like. Follow these guides to import your demo and begin customizing the demo content:

• Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
• Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Customize, Update, and Release Your Art!

Once your site is up and running with a WordPress theme, the sky is the limit. You can explore tons of WordPress plugins to add features to your website, optimize loading speed, and make your art and portfolio stand out. Check out these additional resources that will make your life easier and working with your website more enjoyable.

How to Install WordPress Plugins

A/B Test Features on Your Website

How to Choose the Right Colors for Your Website

How to Set Up Facebook Dynamic Ads for Your Artwork Store

Color Psychology and Your Website

Part of choosing the right colors is knowing what colors mean to your audience. Keeping in mind that colors mean different things in different contexts and cultures, you can easily find colors that accomplish your goals. I’ll come back to that in a moment, but for now let’s look at how color psychology can inform the choices you make.

Color Context

Colors often have different meanings in different contexts. For example green is often associated with environmental or conservation causes, while green can also indicate a successful action such as entering the correct password.  The colors you choose can be useful navigation guides. However, you should never rely on color alone to indicate important states such as error messages.

Red and green are known to cause problems with accessibility for colorblindness, as you can see in this example. There are some free tools to check colorblindness accessibility on your website:

• The Colorblinding Chrome extension—simulates colorblindness on any website you’re browsing.
• Coblis colorblindness simulator—upload any image file and simulate colorblindness.

Aside from the accessibility problems that arise with different colors and contrasts, keep in mind that colors also have cultural cues, such as red or yellow for alerts or warnings and green for confirmations.

Perception of Brands and Products

With the right color choice, you can better control the perception of your brand, products, and website. For example, bank websites tend to use blue as their primary color because it implies stability and trust.

Here are some great examples of how well-known companies have made color choices to control the perception of their brand.

Using Contrast as a Cue to Take Action

Most websites have an end goal of getting the user to take some kind of action. Color can help direct your users to those areas, such as buttons or important callouts, by using the power of contrast.

A theory known as the Von Restorff effect suggests that using a color that is totally different (in isolation) from all the other colors on your site will immediately draw the user’s attention to that spot.

Research has shown that calls to action with bright colors drive action way more than darker or muted colors. And even within the common choices for buttons, such as green, red, and yellow, companies have found a 21% increase in actions taken just by changing the color of the button. The performance of your button color and calls to action will depend on your audience, but it’s one of the easiest A/B tests you can run to discover what works best.

Choosing Colors for Your Audience

Now that you have an understanding of how color psychology can inform your website design, let’s move the focus over to your audience. Before you choose colors, you should conduct a little research about your people. While surveys and focus groups are great for staying in touch with your customers, you may not have those resources yet, so where do you turn?

Instead, research your competition. This is a great opportunity to observe the choices they’ve made and assess what you can do better. Think about how you might use a color palette to beat the competition.

Color Preferences

Depending on who your demographic is, you might use a different palette entirely. Studies show that certain color preferences can draw a specific group of people in, or repel them. Keep in mind, these are generalizations, so you shouldn’t build your whole strategy on them.

Researchers have identified certain color preferences by gender, which can be useful if your business or blog is catering to a specific gender’s interests.

Location is another consideration that can affect your color choices.

As you can see, blue and red can mean very different things across the world, so if your target audience is in a specific geographic location, it’s a good idea to research the cultural significance of your color choices.

Determining the Emotional Impact of Your Color Choices

In addition to color context and preferences, a big part of choosing the right colors is the emotional impact. Your colors should leave users feeling exactly way you want them to about your brand. So if your big push is credibility, blue is a great option. Or if you want to inspire your customers to be creative, try purple.

This great color chart from CoSchedule can help you choose the colors that will most likely convey the feeling you want for your brand. Also, their word association chart can help further refine your ideas.

Finding your audience and the emotional impact you want to make as a brand will set you up nicely to create a color palette you can test.

Creating a Great Color Palette for Your Website

The key to a good color palette is balance. Having too many colors makes balance difficult to achieve. Plus, research points to the fact that users prefer websites with simple color palettes, so keep yours to no more than 3 primary colors.

To add variety, texture, and hierarchy, you can experiment with the different shades of your primary color choices. This article on color in UI design shows how effective designing with one color can be.

Adjusting the saturation and brightness of your primary color choice can give you a great palette of secondary colors to add dimension to your website.

Balancing Your Colors

When actually placing your colors in different areas of your website, it’s good to go by the 60/30/10 rule. This means using your primary color 60% of the time, a secondary color 30% of the time, and a contrasting color (this would be your call to action or button color) 10% of the time.

Often this translates to a hierarchy on websites that carries through each page. For example, you might have a header with your dominant color, a white background for the page content with splashes of your secondary color, and your contrasting call to action color smattered across buttons, links, and important callouts.

When playing with your options, keep accessibility in mind and use the colorblindness tools from the beginning of the article to check your contrast.

Common Website Elements and Color Choices

To help you get on track faster, and not waste time reinventing the wheel, let’s look at some examples of how a color palette might be used with common website elements.

Here are two homepages for similar products—Nike and Brooks. We could summarize their color palettes by element:

• Header
• Navigation
• Buttons
• Text
• Images

Nike relies on a stark black and white scheme with splashes of bright, highly contrasting colors in their images. This has the effect of appealing to a wide audience—which makes sense because Nike spans the sports, fitness, and fashion industries.

Brooks, on the other hand, is more running-focused. They use a similar black and white palette, but with a very bright blue secondary color which is also used for their calls to action.

The simplicity of these palettes make it easy to navigate without getting distracted and draw attention to the products—perfect for an ecommerce website. Brooks even uses their blue as part of their brand promise, with their “true blue guarantee”—that’s a prime example of how to insert your secondary color right where users are looking for more information (it shows up after the product feed).

As you can see in these examples, the headers and footer are full, saturated primary colors, while other elements are accented with more or less color saturation. This creates a nice balance of color and allows your buttons and calls to action to stand out.

Practical Tools for Creating Your Color Palette

Now that you can strategize and research your color choices, I’ve wrangled up some of the best free tools online to help you get started.

• Color Hunt – Find interesting color combinations and copy the color codes.
• The Colorbook – Find the most popular color palettes from leading designs on dribbble.
• Coolors.co – Generate random color palettes by pressing the spacebar and create palettes by uploading images.
• Colorzilla chrome extension – See a color or palette you like? Get the color code using this Chrome extension.

Find Out Your Current Site Speed

Before you start optimizing, get a pulse on what your site speed is now. Pingdom is a speed testing tool that allows you to paste your site address in and run a performance test for free. You’ll be able to test your site virtually from different locations in the world—a great advantage if you have a specific geographical audience. The tool will give you a score and some suggestions to optimize your speed.

After running your speed test, you’ll also get a list of specific performance insights. Using this list, you can root out the more pressing issues with your site speed first, and work your way down to the smaller problems later.

Go ahead and run your test. When you can pinpoint some areas for improvement, you’re ready to move on to the next step. These five optimizations are great for any WordPress site, but can also help you solve some of the more specific problems found in your performance report on Pingdom.

1. Optimize Your Hosting Plan

Some of the biggest gains can come from upgrading your hosting plan. Depending on your plan, and how much traffic you have, your hosting plan may not be adequate. In order to fix this, the easiest path is changing your hosting plan, or worst case scenario, your provider.

With shared hosting, often the most affordable option, you are hosting your website on a server shared with other websites. Depending on the traffic, one website might be making more requests to the server and slowing down all the other sites.

Some great options to enhance your server performance are Bluehost’s WordPress hosting plan or their Dedicated Hosting, depending on your budget constraints. If you’re changing hosting providers, keep in mind that you’ll need to migrate your website to make it work.

Now, you don’t necessarily have to upgrade your hosting plan to make your website faster. Let’s look at some free ways to optimize before you make that decision.

2. Use Browser Caching to Optimize Loading Times

Web browsers have a feature known as caching. It works by saving some of the files and images loaded the first time you visit a website so that it loads faster the next time you visit it. With WordPress, you can enhance the caching functionality of your website for free with a plugin.

The W3 Total Cache plugin is a great way to set up better caching on your WordPress website. This plugin will let you configure caching and can really trim down the time it takes to load your page.

Here’s how to install WordPress plugins.

3. Optimize Your Images

Many websites you visit will have very large image files that take a long time to load. Image compression can take care of this. There are ways to optimize your images even when they’re already uploaded to your website. The Smush WordPress plugin from WPMUDEV will allow you to compress existing images on your WordPress site, and will even convert your images into compressed jpegs. This plugin comes free, and also offers a pro version which allows you to smush your whole image library at once.

Now that you know about image optimization, you should also compress any new images you upload. The smush plugin can be configured to auto-smush any new images, but we recommend checking your image sizes and compressing them as much as you can on your own first. You can compress images in a program like Adobe Photoshop if you have it, but there are also free image compressors on the web, like compressor.io. For the web, always try to get the best image quality in the smallest file possible.

Another way to optimize pages with lots of images is a lazy load plugin. a3 Lazy Load is a great option, which will only load the images visible on the page first, and then load new images as you scroll down, saving tons of loading power.

4. Database Optimization

This sounds like something you’d hire an intern to do. But thankfully, optimizing your WordPress database is easy with the right plugin. One of the preferred plugins is WP Optimize, which is amazing and also free. What it does, essentially, is clear out any unnecessary data being stored. It specifically targets some of the inefficiencies that are built into WordPress functions that are often unused. For example, WordPress stores infinite revisions of posts so you can go back to a previous version. While this is an awesome feature, you probably don’t need all 150 revisions for all time and eternity.

Installing this plugin will optimize many of the features on your website automatically, and you can control what gets optimized. A bonus feature is that you can set up automatic backups with UpdraftPlus to run before each database cleanup.

5. Changing WordPress Settings

In addition to the many free plugins and resources available to speed up your website, you can change some basic WordPress settings to maximize efficiency.

Keep Everything Updated

One of the most basic approaches, and most vital, is to keep all your software up-to-date. Navigate to Dashboard > Updates to check for updates available for your WordPress core software and plugins. Updating is also crucial for your site security.

Adjust Reading Settings

Another thing you can do, especially for blogs or portfolios, is adjust your reading settings by going to Settings > Reading.

Here you can reduce the load by lowering the number of posts per page, and by choosing Summary instead of full text for the feed.

Adjust Discussion Settings

There are some minor gains for altering WordPress’s default discussion settings by going to Settings > Discussion.

First, disable link notifications from other blogs as shown here.

And if you have a ton of comments (congratulations) you may want to split them into pages using the setting below.

Deactivating and Removing Bad or Unnecessary Plugins

Plugins are at the heart of WordPress customization. In fact, many times it’s better—in terms of speed—to start with a lean WordPress theme and add plugins to expand the features you need. But there are some bad plugins out there, which may slow your site down. Read our guide to finding good WordPress plugins to be proactive about choosing the good ones.

Using the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin you can figure out which plugins are slowing you down and determine if you can deactivate them.

Common culprits are things like slider plugins and outdated front end plugins. Also, if there’s a plugin that you only use once in a while, you can deactivate it until you need it again.

In addition, you should always take a general look at plugins and do some spring cleaning. Just like going through your closet, ask yourself if you are going to use it. If not, get rid of it, and you can always get it back if you decide you need it.

These 5 free and easy tips can take your site speed from sluggish to speedy with only a couple hours of fiddling. There’s always more room for improvement, and each website is a different story. So if you find yourself stuck, give us a call or check out WP Live. Our WordPress experts can walk you through your site performance upgrade step-by-step.

Step 1. Identify Your Goals and Audience

Before you create a portfolio site, it’s important to nail down these two ideas. If you simply create a portfolio based on what you like, that’s fine, but it may not be effective.

First, establish what your goals are. Is this portfolio a place to demonstrate your work experience and skills for a specific role? Or is it to build an audience around your artwork or writing and even sell some stuff? Those are two very different outcomes with different paths to get there.

Next, who is your audience? If you’re angling for a specific job type, or a significant career change, it’s important to do your homework on the recruiters and hiring managers you’ll be talking to. This means researching and reading job descriptions from the type of companies you want to work for, identifying the keywords and job requirements, and translating that information into a strategy for what goes in your portfolio and how it’s designed.

Step 2. Create a Strategy and Sitemap

Once you feel comfortable with your understanding of the career you want and the people who you want to view your portfolio, it’s time to strategize and map it out. This is a vital step because it will shape the direction of your site design and the content you include.

Strategy

Depending on your goals and audience, you’ll need to assemble different content and create a navigation structure.

For example, if you’re trying to get a copywriting job, you’ll need to find what types of work and media are common among copywriting job requirements. Then, looking back at your history of work, try to assemble at least one example of each to include in your portfolio.

Aside from the work on your portfolio, determine what other features you’ll need to impress recruiters and managers or prospective clients. For example, if you’re advertising freelance work, there should be an easy way for clients to contact you right from your website. Or if you’re going for a writing position, or any for that matter, writing a blog about your profession can go a long way.

And remember, even if you don’t have the work to show yet, you can always create it. Taking classes with Udemy and creating example portfolio pieces is great experience and shows the scrappiness that a lot of companies look for.

Sitemap

Your sitemap is essentially a more concrete sketch of your strategy. Considering which pieces of work you need, and what information and features need to be included, how do all those pages and features work together, and where are they positioned on your site? What type of visual layout will present your work most effectively?

You can start by mapping out each step on paper, beginning with the home page. Define what you need on each page, and how the pages connect to each other. Keep your goal and audience in mind throughout this step, and don’t be afraid to make decisions. Your sitemap and layout are something you will continue to optimize and tweak over time.

Free Tools:

There are many free tools available to help you research your audience, determine goals and assist with your website project.

• Resume builder by uptowork – This can help you create your resume and discover best practices for communicating your skills and experience.
• The best portfolio websites around – Use this list to explore ideas and find well-done portfolios in your industry.
• Trello – Keep all your tasks organized and create a timeline to get your portfolio done.
• GlooMaps – Create a visual sitemap for free and never lose track of your layout.

Step 3. Create Your Portfolio Website

If you have a goal, audience and sitemap concept ready, creating your portfolio website will be a breeze. From here on out, it’s about setting up your basic website infrastructure and making some design choices.

Website Hosting and Domain Name

Even though we all visit websites every day, a lot of us don’t know how that visit actually happens. Websites are basically files stored on servers connected to the internet, which your computer accesses and loads remotely. Website hosting companies provide the infrastructure for storing your website for others to access, and often provide domain names, which are like registered addresses for your websites, also known as URLs.

Install WordPress

At MOJO Marketplace, WordPress is our primary tool because it offers amazing flexibility. With open source free and premium plugins, tools, and themes (design templates), you can really do anything without writing any code. And as you learn more and more, WordPress comes in handy for integrating cool technology and marketing tricks.

So once you have hosting, installing WordPress should be a breeze. You simply need to find the one-click WordPress install button provided by most hosting companies. This will be found in your control panel, or cPanel, and it will only take a few seconds. Your host will then email you some log in credentials for WordPress. You can then sign in to your WordPress admin dashboard—where you’ll customize your site and create content—by accessing your domain with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a Portfolio WordPress Theme

Next, you’ll need a WordPress theme to build your portfolio with. WordPress themes are like templates for your website, which include a user interface for customizing your design, layout, and features. At MOJO we sell premium WordPress themes, which offer much more flexibility, customization, and powerful designs. You can find free WordPress themes, but you often run into limitations within the first minutes of customizing. In addition, many of our premium themes include demo designs which you can import. These will save you hours of work, and can be customized to fit your unique goals.

We’ve assembled our favorite portfolio themes as a starting point, but there are many many options on our marketplace.

Import Your Theme Demo and Customize

If you found a great design, why not use it as a starting point rather than trying to reinvent the wheel? That’s where importing a WordPress theme demo comes in handy. Some themes feature one-click demo imports, and you can get it done in minutes.

Follow these guides to import your demo and start customizing:

1. Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
2. Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Put Your Work on the Map

Once you have a basic design in place, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of adding your content. Most portfolio themes feature a specific portfolio module where you can add pieces, categorize them, and have automatic formatting applied based on your needs. As you work toward customizing and refining your portfolio, check out these guides to gain more insights:

More Tips On Creating a Web Portfolio

5 Ways to Improve Your Website with Simple A/B Tests

6 Copywriting Techniques for the Best SEO

How to Install WordPress Plugins that Improve Your Website

Step 1. Create a Brand Strategy

Before you set out creating a website for your business, you should have a clear outline of your brand. All the aspects of the design, copy, and which features are included will be drawn from your brand strategy. The idea is to create something that fulfills your customers’ expectations and accomplishes your business goals.

Combining those two ideas can be very tricky, and that’s why having a solid strategy in place is important.

As we cover in the guide above, finding the sweet spot where your audience’s needs intersect with your goals is about learning from interactions with customers. Creating a website gives you incredible access to data about what prompts your customers to buy, and how to optimize both your product and the experience you offer.

If you can, talk to your current customers about what works for them, what doesn’t, and what they would expect from your website. If you can’t access your customers, or you’re just starting your business, then you’ll need to start with a brand identity that you think will work best, based on your current knowledge and assumptions, and then refine as you learn more.

Free Tools

There are many free tools that enable you to measure interactions and refine your website copy, design, features and even the products or services you sell with data. Here are a few big ones to keep at the ready for when your website is ready to launch.

• Google Analytics – Track traffic and interactions on your website
• Google Optimize – Run A/B tests and refine your site
• Google Tag Manager – Integrate third-party tracking technology (such as advertising pixels)

Step 2. Create a Site Map and Gather Content Assets

This step ensures that you don’t have to rebuild your website because you missed something important. Based on your research and planning from step 1, think about the features, pages, and information you need for your business website to be operational. For the initial launch, you should focus on the MVP, or minimum viable product.

The idea of an MVP is to have a product that works and can accomplish business goals while meeting customer expectations. But an MVP doesn’t have to be the complete vision for your product—nor should it be. By starting small, you can discover what your customers really need, and how that plays in with your business strategy. This enables you to refine your products and website experience more and more with each new release or improvement to your products and services.

So think hard about what you need to be operational, and put the big goals on the map for the future. Then, you can create a viable map for your site that includes:

• Each critical piece of information your customers need to know—what is your product, how much does it cost, how does it work, are there refunds, warranty, etc. Think about it as if you’re explaining it to someone who’s never heard of your product or service.
• Find the breakdown of pages for all this info, organized so that customers can find it easily and intuitively. For example, don’t include product features without the price points.
• Now, map the flow for every interaction you need for the MVP. For instance, the home page > the product categories > sub categories > product details and pricing > checkout > follow up (emails and content).

It can help to list out each piece of information critical to your sales cycle and then draw out a map, whether pen and paper or a post-it wall, of how all those pieces fit together. This will be an uphill battle, but when you get to the actual site building step, it will make it way easier to manage all your detailed information and processes.

Free Tools:

Mapping out your site can be a difficult process, especially if there are multiple teams or stakeholders involved in the process. Luckily, there are some really great free tools for keeping track of all of it.

I’d recommend Trello, which is technically a project management software, for listing out each piece of info, content, or feature you need for your MVP. Then, your whole team can keep track of progress, logins for tools, and details, while still having a bird’s-eye view of what needs to be done.

When you’re ready to create the visual map, GlooMaps is a free, web-based application that makes mapping it all out easier. And unlike post-it note maps, you can share this with your team, and access it from anywhere.

Step 3. Build Your Website

If you’ve created a basic strategy and mapped out your site, you’re ready to build it. And the first step to creating a website is finding a place to put it. Literally.

Install WordPress

WordPress is our favorite platform for building a business because it offers the most flexibility and open-source/free tools. It’s great for startups looking to DIY without incurring the potentially huge development and design costs. It’s easy to integrate amazing marketing tools like OptinMonster, Google Analytics, and Constant Contact, and much more.

But first, you’ll need to install WordPress through your hosting provider. After you set up a hosting account, you’ll have access to the control panel, or cPanel, where most providers feature a one-click WordPress installation. Make sure your provider offers a WordPress installation feature—that’s a bare minimum these days.

Once you’ve installed WordPress on your website, you should receive an email with your login credentials. These will get you into your WordPress admin dashboard, which is where you configure all the settings for your website. You can access this login page any time by typing in your website URL with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a WordPress Theme for Your Business

WordPress themes are essentially templates for your business website that you can customize with your feature sets and branding. Premium WordPress themes, which are what we sell on MOJO Marketplace, feature the latest and greatest in design, code, and customization features. Although you can find free WordPress themes, you will quickly run into limitations that require coding or editing of the theme files, especially with more unique business models and features.

We recommend finding a WordPress theme with an importable demo design that fits your business model. For example, The Core WordPress theme features 23 demo designs for a variety of businesses, which you can customize to your liking without writing any code.

With a theme like The Core, you can find designs for yoga studios, restaurants, mobile apps, creative agencies—you name it—that follow industry best-practices in design and are fully responsive. Also, these demos include content mockups that make it easier for you to base your site map on, using tried and true practices.

Check out more business and multipurpose themes on MOJO Marketplace.

Install Your WordPress Theme

Once you’ve chosen your WordPress theme, it’s time to install it through WordPress. Remember that installing a theme doesn’t mean it’s active, so you can install as many themes as you like and preview them with an existing site’s content. When you’re ready to push it live, you can click Activate on the theme you like by selecting Appearance > Themes > Activate (on the chosen theme).

Read our guide to install your WordPress theme.

Import Your Theme Demo and Customize

Now, if you found a great demo design with your WordPress theme that fits your business model, that’s where you should start. You can easily import those designs and customize the content in a matter of hours, getting your site off the ground super fast.

Follow these guides to import your demo and start customizing:

1. Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
2. Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Kick Off Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you’ve completed your website, you’re already on the market. With SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, your site will soon be indexed by Google and the more you refine your keywords and write quality content, the more you’ll appear in search results.

But your website is just the first step to making money online. It’s time to start integrating marketing, online scheduling software, and advertising tools and tracking your progress, and even optimizing your site for better user experience and a higher conversion rate. We’ve assembled a list of guides to get you started:

• How to Create Killer Marketing Campaigns with WordPress Tools

• 5 Ways to Improve Your Website with Simple A/B Tests

• 4 Quick & Easy Tips to Help You Start Advertising on Facebook

• How To Best Configure Your Business’s AdWords Account

• How to Integrate Conversion Pixels on WordPress

Step 1. Choose an Audience and Subject

The first step is simple but can easily send you down a spiraling rabbit hole of choices: find your audience and subject. The most important part is the audience. Who are they, and what do they want? What sparks interest for them?

The most obvious path forward is to create an audience based on your own interests. In other words, you’re the first member of this audience.

Now, pick a subject. What are you passionate about? What do you want to learn about? This is where you should start, and remember that you can always refine and change things as you go—and you should because your audience will change too.

Example

A great example of choosing an audience and subject can be gleaned from the Succulents and Sunshine blog. We heard this blogger speak at a conference about how she didn’t know much about keeping succulents in general, let alone in a state with cold winters.

She used that interest as an opportunity to learn more about succulents, care and maintenance through blogging. Now, Succulents and Sunshine has a huge audience based on a small niche subject choice.

This story shows how you can really fall into a great blog concept by thinking about the things you want to learn more about. As you learn, you can share your findings and that in and of itself is a great blog concept.

Free Tools

If you’re bursting at the seams with great ideas, you shouldn’t have a problem finding your subject and audience. However, using a free tool like Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator couldn’t hurt for getting the juices flowing. You may want to do this regardless. Even if you already have a subject idea, you’re going to need content ideas—lot’s of them—to get started.

Step 2. Create a Content Calendar for this Year

Before we get into the details of creating a website for your blog, we should really make sure your idea is appealing to you. There’s no better way to do that then planning out your content for a year. This means setting a weekly schedule and cadence for your posts, brainstorming article ideas and themes and putting it all on a schedule that you can keep to.

As you start planning out content, it should quickly become clear if you’ll enjoy it or not. Successful blogs put out high-quality content consistently on a schedule their audience comes to expect. If you don’t like what you’re writing about, the quality will inevitably suffer, and your readers will look elsewhere.

Free Tools

Planning a content calendar can be as simple or as complex as you like. CoSchedule offers a free content calendar template to help you format and find topics and article ideas for your blog. I also recommend using CoSchedule’s headline analyzer as a rule of thumb for writing engaging headlines for each article.

Step 3. Create Your Blog Website

Creating your blog website will be one of the most fulfilling parts of the process. Before you start, though, run through this checklist to make sure you’re ready to dive in.

• Know your audience
• Know your subject
• Research blogs with similar topics for best practices
• Create a content calendar/schedule you can handle
• Come up with 3-5 names for your blog (in case one of them is taken)

Website Hosting and Domain Name

A lot of people understand websites, but how websites are hosted is less common knowledge. Basically, a website is a group of files that you access over the internet and load on your computer. Those files need a place to live, and that’s your hosting plan.

Hosting companies have come a long way, and you’re in the golden age of DIY websites. Before you start customizing your website and creating content, you’ll need to get a hosting service and domain name. Many hosting providers offer you a free or cheap domain name with the purchase of a hosting plan.

Install WordPress

Next, after setting up your hosting and domain name, it’s time to install WordPress. With most hosting providers, installing WordPress is as simple as clicking a button and waiting.

A note on WordPress: it’s the platform that powers 1/4 of the internet, and it’s built around blogging. We sell a variety of website CMS, or content management system tools, to accommodate preferences. However, we’ve seen the best user experiences and best results from WordPress sites and tools. WordPress offers you amazing flexibility and expansive options.

Once you’ve installed WordPress on your website, you should receive an email with your login credentials. These will get you into your WordPress admin dashboard, which is where you configure all the settings for your website. You can access this login page any time by typing in your website URL with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a WordPress Blog Theme

The next step is choosing your WordPress theme. A WordPress theme is a template and user interface for creating your own custom website. Themes vary greatly, from free to premium, and each offers different features and ways to customize.

Installing a good WordPress theme can save you incredible amounts of time and money and give you an up-to-date, functional design without requiring you to code or hire a web designer. Premium themes run about $59 on average, and provide incredible features and customizations that you won’t find with free themes.

Read our guide to choosing the perfect WordPress theme for your project or browse the top selling blog WordPress themes on MOJO Marketplace to get some ideas. Keep in mind that you can try any theme demo and experience all the options and styles before you buy your theme.

Install Your WordPress Theme

Once you’ve chosen your WordPress theme, it’s time to install it through WordPress. Remember that installing a theme doesn’t mean it’s active, so you can install as many themes as you like and preview them with an existing site’s content. When you’re ready to push it live, you can click Activate on the theme you like by selecting Appearance > Themes > Activate (on the chosen theme).

Read our guide to install your WordPress theme.

Import Your Theme Demo and Customize

All WordPress themes come with a demo design, or multiple demo designs. These designs are professionally crafted by the web developer who created your theme and are often designed to the current trends and specifications for specific types of websites, such as blogs.

By importing a design, you can have a fully fledged website up and running in seconds. Then all you have left is customizing the content and branding. Check out these two guides to import a demo and start customizing:

1. Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
2. Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Start Blogging

Now that your WordPress site is set up and customized, you’re ready to start writing content, taking photos or designing images, and pushing it all out to your audience via social media and email marketing.

Before you begin, read our post on writing your first blog post in WordPress. This post will give you a primer on the WordPress content editor and show you how to schedule content to publish in the future (wow technology!). This is where you can start putting your content calendar to use.

After your blog is up and running, check back on our Start a Blog and Grow Your Audience categories to learn more blogging tips and marketing strategies.

Benefits of Creating a New WordPress Site for Your Business or Creative Projects

Like a solid and targeted social media presence, a professional website is essential for your online presence and business development strategy, whether you are launching a niche product or service, marketing your own creative projects or looking to attract new clients. Think of your website as your online headquarters and central hub for your social media accounts and content marketing strategy.

Make More Money with Affiliate Marketing

If you are Kylie Jenner, or another mega influencer on social media with an established platform that reaches millions of people around the world, a choice social media account might be enough to net you a lucrative income. But for the most part, online sales and profits are driven by a well-developed and targeted inbound marketing strategy that involves offering relevant, quality content to an engaged audience on a regular basis. Building a list of subscribers and developing a loyal and dedicated following with your website can help you leverage your readership for successful affiliate marketing and sales.

Personal and Professional Enrichment

Chances are that you’ve read about at least one person in your chosen field or industry with a successful business that began as a humble blog. From honing your writing, marketing and sales to valuable content marketing skills from running your own site, one of the most effective ways to showcase your work to potential customers or employers is to show it off through a WordPress site. Think of a good WordPress site as a resume, portfolio and interview all rolled into one.

If your goal is to build a business, pursue a new hobby or skill, make more sales or land a new job, developing a website should be at the top of your to-do list for 2018.