WordPress To Go: How To Build A WordPress Website On Your Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A Complete Beginner

I need to build a website and was looking at £500-1000 for a professionally made one even though what I want is fairly simple. Got this thinking I'd just see if it made it simple to build your own and it's a GREAT read. Really simple clear instructions, has given me huge confidence, am going to have a good go at doing it myself! I'll report back in due course but I can tell just from the way it is written that it will be as easy as it can be made to be! Quick update: it's even better than I thought, the hosts she recommends are brilliant and the software (with her guidance) is really easy to use. If I'd had all my images and text ready to use I'd have had a good attractive website up and running in under 3 hrs. I'm having fun tinkering and I'll come back and leave a link when it looks presentable! So far I've spent about £70 for this guide, the hosting package for 2 years, the domain name and some professional images I needed. Really, really good guide! Update: [...] if anyone wants to have a look (I write historical novels so its my own person website). I think overall I paid £100 (images, hosting, the book itself, domain name etc) and I'm pleased with it. There are fancier ones you can build as well of course (and look out for ones tailored to special requirements like photographers) but it really is quite easy to use. If you get stuck, enter Wordpress, your theme and the problem into a search engine and there are lots of forums where people explain how to do something (easily!). So overall, very impressed. Yes if you wanted something fancier of course you could have it built but this is a cheap and easy to use option for those wanting a simple site - and you feel pretty good for building your own site!

I got introduced to wordpress by an adventure when I was looking into ways of building my own website without using a web designer. I started to build the site, but it was looking like that of an amateur, as I could not use/edit most of the dashboard functions. This then made me to look for a wordpress book on Amazon. I bought the first book "24-hour Wordpress Trainer" but this book did not really helped me with the way I would have wanted my site to look. I then went back to Amazon to look for other wordpress books, and them came across "Wordpress To Go" by Sarah McHarry. I decided to give the book a go, based on the reviews of people who have bought this book. As soon as I opened the book, I knew outright that this book will help me a great deal in achieving my dream of building at least a good wordpress site. I was not disappointed since Sarah began with how to buy a domain name and hosting of your site. This book gave lessons on how to install wordpress, log in and out of wordpress which also include how to customise your wordpress site. I'm already used to all these and simply opened to the more needed area like "steps to a perfect website", "all about widgets", etc. Of most interest and importance to me are: • How to install wordpress themes and customise it with regards to background, image, colour scheme, site title, header image and installation of useful plugins. • Adding of images to wordpress site which she explained on how to do this from the "media library" and how you can upload images for future use in the media library. I have no idea on how to use this before until I read this wordpress to go by Sarah. Sarah also gave her opinion about adding images/photos to your pages/post as it literally makes your webpage look attractive and relevant. • This book thought me how to add a video to my site, I did not even know that it was so simple and easy to install a video that you recorded by yourself or someone else until I read this wordpress book. Other interesting things that I learnt in this book which though is for a beginner in wordpress and not for the advanced students include: • How to add an image using a text widget. • How to use a text widget to display a banner Ad. • Sarah's opinion about custom menu and why it is good to use them. According to the author, custom menus are a relatively new feature of wordpress but it add a lot of flexibility and power to the design of a wordpress site. • The author also shows how to create a primary, secondary menu and setting the home page of your wordpress site. This book is really good for a beginner in wordpress and is fully loaded with so many examples and instructions on how to get started, be up and running within few hours of dedication and hardwork. Esther (www.tld-reviews.com)

I bought this book after getting lost in the mine of information out there on Wordpress and really needing a foundation of understanding key points before trying to build my knowledge. This guide successfully identified the main areas I needed to understand to get me up and running with building my first proper Wordpress site. I am not a 'techie', and tend to get intimidated by 'tech speak' but Sarah McHarry's guide was very clear with an accessible, friendly writing style, she helps you every step of the way! I now feel confident enough to try it all out and create my first site. Would definitely recommend this book, I found it a great read.

This book really does cover everything a beginner needs, nothing more, in an accessible format. Its broken down into manageable chunks and allows even the most computer illiterate to get up to speed easily; it is those people that this book should be aimed at. My issue is that there is really nothing above the base level and should be called wordPress changing settings to go. If you want to make a website with WordPress by choosing a predefined theme and not really much else then this is your book. Unfortunately i want to make my own site with a bit more functionality and customisabitlity and will now be purchasing another book. But the book did help me understand the very basics of WordPress in a really short time frame so i can't fault it for that. Also if you don't choose the hosting site that the author recommends you will then have to go outside the book to learn how to put wordpress onto your own domain. I did this through the look inside feature of this book WordPress 24-Hour Trainer

I'm not especially technically minded but this book is so easy to read and understand and takes you through step by step how to build and personalise a website using wordpress. It uses a specific wordpress template - twentyfourteen. You really don't need to know anything, just some common sense and this book. I built a site using this template and that gave me confidence to do it again using a different template. If you are looking to build a basic website with multiple pages and navigation and don't know how to start, this book will enable you to do that. I went slowly through the steps and it look me less than two hours.

This is a first-class introduction to using WordPress. I am a writer and aretired(?) computer professional and wanted something really practical, yet not a book that talked down to me. It was brilliant, taking me step by step through the process of setting up a website. Each stage was carefully explained in a truly adult-to-adult way. Extra information was given where this was deemed either helpful or challenging, neither too much or too little. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone creating their first website, or even just thinking of it - this book will persuade you to get started! Real value for money - a gold mine! Phil Coleman Coming website: brockpubs.com.

This book is great value and gets you results quickly. It does not pretend to cover advanced topics only the basics and does that well. I drop one star because the illustrations are too small and the book lacks an index. I also had a lot of difficulty with Lesson 13 which seems to suggest you can discard the default Home Page and nominate another page to be your Home Page. I tried this but it never worked properly, there were always unwanted side-effects. The solution was to uncheck this box: Appearance -> Theme Options -> Home Page -> Enable Custom Front Page. Once that was unchecked I could customize the default Home Page to what I wanted so there was no need to remove it and substitute another in its place. It's a dubious idea anyway because I read somewhere that the default Home Page is tied into the php code. So if the author could improve Lesson 13 that would be great. In Lesson 14 almost a page is wasted on only describing child themes when in the same space an example could have shown us how to actually do something useful such as override some css to change the look of a page. But in spite of these minor issues the book is still a gem.

I built my first web site in 2001 using Microsoft Front Page. When I decided to build a biographical website this year(2018) I went back to Microsoft to use Front Page again. But this no longer exists. Microsoft works with Wix who charge a subscription of about £70.00 per annum. Over twenty years that's £1400! So I decided to buy a book and do it myself. The first book I purchased was Dr. Andy Williams book "1-hour WordPress 2018". This is a big glossy book which is easy to follow. But it is American and directs you to use the author's recommended web hosts and registrars. Which is fine but maybe not the best deal. Anyway, I wanted a British book which is why I purchased "Build your own WordPress website". This easy to follow, but differs from the other books mentioned in this review because it is for small businesses. In this context, if you think you might want a business website - read the last chapter first. This is on E-commerce and emphasises the importance of SSL! In addition, this book reviews the important plugins on Security, Back-ups and Forms If you don't want the business element you might want to read "WordPress to go" by Sarah McHarry. This book recommends 'site ground' as a web host. This comes with various freebies which you don't get with the other recommended web hosts. Either way, if you can afford it I would recommend having two websites - one to experiment with and one as your proper site.

This book is well written and gives just the critical info needed by a beginner. My only regret is that I finished reading the book. Lots of illustrations, I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to launch their first WP website.

I find this book best ever referred so far.This has cleared almost all of my doubts in first reading, Thanks

Fantastic read - just get it and read it - better than good.

Muchísimas gracias Sarah por escribir este manual gracias al que he podido desarrollar mi primer website WordPress en menos de 4 días. Muy aconsejable para todo aquel que pretenda tener su primera experiencia con WordPress. Magnífico trabajo Sarah. Me gustaría poder leer un segundo manual que profundizara más en los secretos de wordPress.

I am a pretty effective SEO specialist but not an expert to actually build a website from scratch - something that some of my clients would be interested in. So I looked into different programs (Dreamweaver being one of them) and found that Wordpress is the ideal platform. However, there are almost no good courses on WP out there, and just a few decent books, most of them either convoluted, unnecessarily technical, and / or very expensive. But then I was lucky to find "Wordpress to Go" - and was hooked. It's no exaggeration but I can say with total conviction (and no, I'm not getting any rewards for this) that Sarah's book is the best tutorial I have ever read - probably on any subject, and certainly on a technical one, bar none. The main upside of this book is the totally practical approach the author takes (I guess only women can be that practical!): clear, very easy to understand, and virtually holding the reader's hand as she goes through all the important WP modules and menus step by step, and extremely clearly. Sarah is a programmer and as such a professional but she has a very readable and personal style, almost as she was sitting across the table. Oh, and BTW, all the info is up-to-date, not some rehashed, obsolete stuff. Hosting (Sarah maybe receives a commission from Hostgator but so what? Hostgator is really the best), Setup, Installation, all are explained very well. The entire WP structure, and all its critical functions, are totally easy to read and understand - and to apply, too, because practical examples and useful screenshots are there to help. WP has a lot of widgets and plugins, and the author gives all pros and cons, and gives plenty of good advice. It's fair to say that unless a user is severely untalented, he / she will be able to apply Sarah's book to build decent WP websites within a few days, often even faster. This is a relatively short e-book (only 80 pages or so), and Kindle pages are not big, so something had to give, such as extensive MySQL and php guidance which is lacking, along with a few other, though non-critical pieces. But the author is practical (a woman, remember?), and has managed to superbly balance vital knowledge with bottom line applicability, and pack into this great book almost as much information as books 10 times the length, one tenth of clarity, and 20 times the price. Bottom line: this book is worth a lot; and at under $ 5 this is the steal of the year.