This is the next article in our series looking at ways to build your own website. Now, WordPress is tricky one because there’s WordPress.org, which this article talks about, and WordPress.com, which we’ll link to a review of once we’ve done it.

As always, these reviews have been put together by my 11 year old son who’s technical (by kid standards) but has no business or online “system” experience.

Setting up your own website with WordPress

I recently tried using WordPress to create a website for a made-up business, Magenta Interiors, in order to see what it was like as a website builder. These are my findings for anyone who is looking for a good website builder to use to start their business.

After someone kindly set me up with an account and a blank site, I had to do a “Password Reset” before I could continue. This alone was rather confusing, and I went around in loops, but that was probably my fault and I soon sorted it out. I was taken to my Dashboard, where I went to Appearance and chose a theme.

[Interjection by Lisa: you need hosting for a WordPress.org site, and some hosts will sell you hosting with WordPress already installed. In this instance, one of our developers set up a new hosting account on one our servers and installed WordPress for my son, and sent him a link to it – much like you’d have if your hosting did it automatically.]

I chose a theme that looked good and matched the style I wanted. However, things soon got very confusing. I customized the theme’s front page, but after I was finished, I couldn’t find it listed under Pages on my WordPress dashboard. After doing some research, I found that this theme wasn’t letting me edit my navigation menus in the normal way and that it had changed how WordPress works. 

This meant I needed to find documentation of how this individual theme worked. I looked around online, only to find that the theme was selling for $89.99, so I didn’t know how I got it for free. I then clicked around a lot, until, for some reason, I stumbled across the documentation. Without paying anything (I hope)! 

Even with the instructions on how to use the theme, things didn’t get much easier. The documentation wasn’t that clear, and I was left not really knowing what to do. I resolved to try to make my other pages (an About and a Blog). They were fairly easy. I just had to write a title and insert a couple of blocks (modular content elements that make up pages and posts). The tricky bit was making my navigation header work. Once again, I just clicked around a lot until I managed to link the pages to my header.

My next problem was a particularly annoying one, and one that I never did solve in the end. My home page had come with a “Words of Appreciation” section, where there were brief quotes from people and star ratings. There were four of them in a row on the page, but for some stupid reason the first one was a decent bit higher than all of the others. WHY? I tried everything, but I couldn’t lower it. It wasn’t specific to that review. If I put a different review first it would take on the extra height as well. SERIOUSLY?

This little bug drove me mad. I spent SO long trying to make all of the reviews level, but to no avail. Eventually I just gave up entirely. YOU BEAT ME THIS TIME, WORDPRESS. HAPPY?

Compared to other website builders, WordPress is significantly harder to use and more annoying. I can’t say exactly how much of this was down to WordPress itself and how much was down to my theme. WordPress does come with it’s own themes, but they were very VERY basic and my other sites (in this review of website builders) are full of photos and look great so I wanted the same for this one.

However, there were some things that I did like about it. For one, it seemed much more capable than other website builders I have used. I feel like if you had the expertise and the skills the possibilities are almost endless.

As someone who has worked with basic HTML in the past, I found the ability to switch between editing my website as code and visually very useful. For example, I didn’t know how to change the colour of some text, but upon changing it to HTML it was just a simple span class, and I could immediately do what I wanted.

I ran WordPress through a tool called Page Speed Insights and got these reports. (bearing in mind this is done with just the base website, no SEO tweaks or anything done to it. If someone knew what they were doing they could make it much better).

Conclusion: a beginner using WordPress

In conclusion, I think WordPress is a very powerful tool, provided you know how to use it. If you are a beginner or someone just looking to make an easy website for their company, then this definitely isn’t for you, and it would be worth considering alternatives such as Wix. However, if you have experience, (or any money to pay someone to do it for you) WordPress is very capable and should not be underestimated.