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I am being tasked with updating my company’s website and I have never used WordPress before. I usually work with some web building software such as Swoogo and Cvent (I work in the events industry).
Is there Since this will be representing my company are there any clean-looking templates or themes that I could use to make my website? Eventually, they want to have a page where we sell items (e.g. floral arrangements, decorations, registration website building services…etc.) Any advice or videos that you would suggest watching?
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On an unrelated note if I wanted to start selling plants what would be my best resource?
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To turn your website into a store, you should install WooCommerce plugin inside WordPress. Regarding the theme, there are plently of options, check WordPress repo for free theme, or themeforest for paid ones.
You should probably ask for a raise before you get yourself into this, unless you feel you’re already being paid adequately.
Disclaimer.. These are my personal suggestions, others may have different suggestions.
WordPress and page builders go hand in hand these days, pick one, oxygen, bricks, elementor, breakdance, gutenberg. Do some research and stick to one of them, I personally use Elementor as I still have the grandfathered $200 a year lifetime membership for 1000 websites.
Once you’ve decided on the page builder you can decide which theme you want to use, I would suggest a barebones theme with as little stylesheets as possible so you can set everything in the page builder settings and don’t have to worry about overwrites or random styling cropping up. Hello Elementor, Neve, Generate Press, Astra.
Once you’ve got your page builder and theme requirements sorted, then you just start building. There’s a few things you have to look at before starting off, determine which caching plugin you will use (Keep disabled while building), which css/js/html and image optimisation plugins you will use, correctly configure the .htaccess, determine whether you’re going to use a security plugin or just use tight security headers, sort out the ssl if it isn’t automatically configured by the host, configuring the basic wordpress settings such as the url and permalinks, then before building anything get an easy to use SEO plugin (I use RankMath) sorted so you can start populating SEO meta and keywords while building, then optimise over time. You may also want to keep the website in maintenance or noindex mode while building so search engines don’t start indexing the site.
You should maybe just google something like “wordpress optimised starting settings”
Then once you feel you can start selling products, you’ll need to get woocommerce installed, and this introduces a lot of variables which I’m not going to bother going into, but a few things you will have to think about are: Product images/photography, taxes, currency conversion, shipping zones, payment, user flow, account security, product seo, category structure.
If you don’t want to lose time best grab a recent WooCommerce course, copy the tutor setup and follow along. There’s a quite recent long 6hr one on YT which looked quite decent. On Udemy the courses usually sell for $15.
Do you know css?
As someone that used to run tradeshows for a living, this is like hiring the drive through employee from McDonald’s to handle your food and beverage catering.
You know, he’s got food experience and all…
Before you start working on the live site, since you’ve never worked with WordPress before, I highly suggest installing Local by Flywheel on your computer and work on a test install of WordPress before you ever touch the live site.
You can freely test plugins, builders, themes, etc.
Also when you do start working on the live site, make sure you have a full backup of the site. Use wpvivid or jetbackup.
Please be very careful with this. They can’t expect you to do this right first time. I must have fugged about with 10+ sites before I started doing it for proper businesses… but hey ho at least you’ve got Web building experience unlike I had haha. Look for a good Udemy course if you want to do this properly, but please please please remember you’ll probably be responsible for security of it going toward. If its handling orders, possibly card details you really need to know what you’re doing for a long term basis.
Perhaps you can hire a freelancer to help with this one?
Hello, something clean and pro ? Kadence theme with kadence blocks and kadence starter template.
hire someone
Hiring someone to do that for you is a better option. Plus it gives you an advantage to get something done in a more professional manner and with good results as well.
With all that being said, I am a professional developer and have been doing wordpress websites for about 8 years now.
And, I would love to do this for you for whatever budget you have. No worries there. If you’d like that, we can start on it.
With these kind of decisions, how is this company even profitable enough to pay you salary!