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Build a Website with WordPress

Out of necessity, in 2009  I started learning to build websites myself with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, including coding HTML and CSS, the main website-building "languages" even today.  However, it was very hard, as getting all the coding right for both design and functionality was EXTREMELY difficult.  Fortunately, though, there are better options now for a dentist who wants/needs a website in the first place, or who wants a better one but lacks the funds, or who just enjoys a new non-dental challenge: WordPress.  Both this website and my primary dental practice website, SmilesbyPayet.com, are built with WordPress, and the great thing is that ZERO coding knowledge is needed!

Need a Better Dental Website?  Build Your Own with WordPress

WordPress Website WorkshopWhile the core of WordPress is FREE (not something we hear as dentists very often, is it? :roll: ), it can take a while to learn the ins-and-outs of making a website look nice.  You know....the sidebars, the header and footer, those RSS feed thingies, etc?  The good news in that arena is what are called "Cus­tom Word­Press Themes‚” which are layouts/designs that are pre-coded for you, and many of them have all that stuff built-in.  Many of these do cost a lit­tle, but com­pared to pay­ing some­one else for a web­site?  CHEAP by com­par­i­son.  I per­son­ally chose to work with the Word­Press Dream Theme 3.0, from GFYDMember.com.  Kim­berly Bohan­non and Ben Cope are the dri­ving force behind this theme and the really won­der­ful webi­nars, Monthly Q&A Ses­sions, and online video tuto­ri­als, all for a VERY rea­son­able fee.

How­ever, there are a tremen­dous num­ber of other free Cus­tom Themes avail­able; you just need to do some home­work and make sure they’ll do what you want.  Alter­nately — if you don’t see some­thing you like or have some­thing spe­cific in mind, you can hire some­one to cre­ate a Cus­tom Theme for you, and prob­a­bly far more rea­son­ably than you’d imag­ine (see the bot­tom of the page for some options).

Extend Word­Press Func­tion­al­ity with Plugins

Beyond all the fea­tures that Word­Press already pro­vides, and that many Cus­tom Themes include, you can add even more power to your web­site through Word­Press Plu­g­ins.  These are like Add-ons for Fire­fox or Exten­sions for Inter­net Explorer — they let you do things that you oth­er­wise couldn’t.  Here are some exam­ples that I per­son­ally use for both WP sites:

  • Akismet — pretty much THE defin­i­tive spam blocker
  • WP to Twit­ter — auto­mat­i­cally sends a Tweet via your des­ig­nated Twit­ter Account
  • Sexy Book­marks — puts those nifty icons at the top or bot­tom of each page and/or blog post to let read­ers share your con­tent to an enor­mous range of social media sites, incl. Face­book, Twit­ter, Dig­goo, Stum­ble­Upon, LinkedIn, and more
  • Word­Press SEO by Yoast — add page/post titles, meta descrip­tions, meta key­words, and more to improve how Google finds you.  And really — EVERY plu­gin by Yoast is pretty awesome.

Online Web­site Build­ing Tuto­ri­als & Aids

There are so many online resources avail­able today, it would be impos­si­ble to list them all.  The great thing about the Web today IMO, is that — if you want/need to find out how to do some­thing, you CAN find out how to do it online! How­ever, I’d like to men­tion a few have been very help­ful for me, as well as some oth­ers that can be useful:

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