Top 10 Principles of Good and Effective Web Design

Top Ten Principles of Good and Effective Web Design

A website makes online presence of your business or organization. Your website must look good and well functionality. Like the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, effective web design is judged by the website users and not the website owners. There are many factors that affect the usability of a website, and it is not just about design overview (how good it looks), but also function (how easy to use). Both of the consideration needs to improve and optimized on your website, here has the top 10 website design principles.

Websites that aren't well designed generally tend to carry out poorly and have sub-top-rated Google Analytics metrics (e.g. high bounce rates, low time on site, low pages per visit and low conversions). So what makes good web design? Under we explore the top 10 website layout principles so as to make your website aesthetically pleasing, easy to use, attractive, and powerful.

1. Objective

Good and Effective Web Design always providers to the needs of the users. Are your web visitors looking for entertainment, information, some type of interaction, or to communicate with your business? Each page of your website needs to have a clear Objective, and to fulfill a specific need for your website users in the most effective way possible.

2. Communication

Visitors always come on the website tend to want information quickly, so it is important to communicate clearly, and make your information easy to read and digest. Some effective methods to include in your web design include: organizing information using headlines and sub headlines. Using bullet points instead of long windy sentences, and cutting the waffle.

3. Font faces and Size

In general, Sans Serif fonts such as Arial and Verdana are easier to read online (Sans Serif fonts are contemporary looking fonts without decorative finishes). The standard font size for reading easily online is 17px. Stick to a maximum of 3 Font faces in a maximum of 3 point sizes to keep your design streamlined.

4. Colors

A well thought out color palette can go a long way to enhance the user experience. Complementary colors create balance and harmony. Using contrasting colors for the text and background will make reading easier on the eye. Vibrant colors create emotion and should be used sparingly (e.g. for buttons and call to actions). Last but not least, white space/ negative space is very effective at giving your website a modern and uncluttered look.

5. Navigation

Navigation is about how easy it is for people to take action and move around your website. Some tactics for effective navigation include a logical page hierarchy, using bread crumbs, designing clickable buttons. Following the ‘three click rule’ which means users will be able to find the information they are looking for within three clicks.

6. Images

A picture can speak a thousand words, and choosing the right images. For your website can help with brand positioning and connecting with your target audience. If you don’t have high quality professional photos on hand, consider purchasing stock photos to lift the look of your website. Also consider using info graphics, videos and graphics as these can be much more effective. At communicating than even the most well written piece of text.

7. Grid based layouts

Placing content randomly on your web page can end up with a haphazard appearance that is messy. Grid based layouts arrange content into sections, columns and boxes. Line up and feel balanced, which leads to a better looking effective web design.

8. “F” Pattern design

Eye tracking studies have identified that people scan computer screens in an “F” pattern. Most of what people see is in the top and left of the screen and the right side of the screen are rarely seen. Rather than trying to force the viewer’s visual flow, effectively designed websites will work with a reader’s natural behavior. Also display information in order of importance (left to right, and top to bottom).

9. Mobile friendly

It is now commonplace to access websites from multiple devices with multiple screen sizes, so it is important to consider if your website is mobile friendly. If your website is not mobile friendly, you can either rebuild it in a responsive layout (this means your website will adjust to different screen widths). Also you can build a dedicated mobile site (a separate website optimized specifically for mobile users).

10. Load time

Everybody hates a website that takes ages to load.  Tips to make page load times more effective include optimizing image sizes (size and scale), combining code into a central CSS or JavaScript. Also file (this reduces HTTP requests) and minify HTML, CSS, JavaScript (compressed to speed up their load time).


It is easy to create a beautiful and functional website, simply by keeping these design elements in mind. Have you got a website design that needs reviewing or optimizing? Or perhaps, you are planning a website and you are looking to get the design right from the ground up. Either way, these principles of effective web design can help your website be more engaging, useful, and memorable for visitors.

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Why Should Use A Landing Page Instead Of Your Homepage

 

Landing page example- webtady landing page

Why Should Use A Landing Page Instead Of Your Homepage

What is a Landing Page?

First of all in the purest sense, a landing page is any single web page that a visitor can arrive at or “land” on. It’s more common to refer to a landing page as being a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective to promote.

This means that your landing page should have no global navigation to tie it to your primary website. The main reason for this is to limit the options available to your visitors, helping to guide them toward your aimed conversion goal.

Types of Landing Pages

There are two basic types of landing page, Click Through and Lead Generation (also referred to as Lead Gen or Lead Capture pages).

Click Through Landing Pages:

Click through landing pages have the goal of reassure the visitor to click through to another page. Typically used in ecommerce funnels, they can be used to describe a product or offer in sufficient detail so as to “warm up” a visitor to the point where they are closer to making a purchasing decision.

Lead Generation Landing Pages:

Lead generation landing pages are used to capture user data, such as a name and email address. The sole purpose of the page is to collect information that will allow you to market to and connect with the prospect at a subsequent time. As such, a lead capture page will contain a form along with a description of what you’ll get in return for submitting your personal data.

If you’re wondering why use a Landing Page instead of your website, read on. We've got the answer for you.

If you are:

1. Running a PPC ad campaign
2. Promoting a product, eBook, email subscription through social media and SEO
3. Advertising on radio, television and print
4. Writing guest posts on 3rd party blogs or magazines

You need to use a page instead of junk people to your website.

What you’ll notice about this list is that each item has a specific goal, to get people to take specific actions: to buy your product, subscribe to your in-house mailing list, download an eBook, case study or white paper, or view a video and many more.

Design a cheap landing page for your website. If you’re doing any of the above, the worst thing you can do is send people to your home page. You need a focused landing page dedicated to the particular action you want people to take. In fact, you need several.

Let me explain.

Focus on Conversion

Are you looking to turn more website visits into conversions? Why it's important to first map out each process an internet user goes through on your site, and then use analytics to find out if it's meeting its goals. You can analyze the landing page by analyzing tools to focus conversions.  So your landing page can derive visitor to your site and convert into leads.

You Can Test a Landing Page

You can test a landing page for your website instead of home page. The landing page will be safe your home page or website from junk peoples. So design a cheap landing page and promote for the purpose of  PPC campaign or SEO.

Remove scattering

Remove the scattering from your website. A fresh and cheap landing page will help you to distraction from main website and that will be safe from dumping peoples.  Over packing your schedule may make you more popular, but it will not get you to your goals every times. So be careful about this matter.

Create Different Versions for Different Ads

Sometimes you may need different types of landing pages due to operate different versions for different ads. In addition you can get more visitors to your site from different links of landing pages. Also create different sales packages for each of the landing a page it may help you to sells more.

Create Different Versions for Organic Search

Nowadays has different types of search engine and they have different types of search strategy. When you campaign your website with the different search engine you have to track those data and analysis the search result. Therefore you need landing pages for each version for organic search engines.

As a result of having a landing page will make more visitors to your website and generate sells.

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Important 10 Features of a Good Business Website

We know everybody it’s crucial to have a small business website and it’s an important asset for your company to compete with your competitor in marketplace. Your website represents your business strength and popularity in market. The success of your small business depends on your good website today.

Here are 10 Features that optimize your site to gather traffic to your site:
 

1. Clearly Visible Contact Information
Make sure your targeted visitor easily get your contact information and business location. Also build a page for all contact information and location that provides all of your important contact information, including phone number, email address, location with a map, and hours of operation. Then add a contact us button at the top to your small business website and add to footer also, and this contact us button will remain with all pages to your website.

At the end all of your contents add a link to Call today to set up your free consultation (for example), directing them to a contact form or directly to your email or phone.

2. Balanced and Accurate Content
Without good and unique content, your website is nothing. Always write the unique and accurate contents for your website. Many business owner people think that more content will do as long as it fills up their WebPages and its looks nice. The fact is nothing could be further from the truth. Your website should needs to be filled with actual information that people will find helpful so that they will convert into your business customers. Also, make sure that your consumers don’t collect wrong information about your business. Don’t copy and post others content to your website, use a program like Copyscape to check all of your content to make sure there is nothing copied.

Important one thing Your WebPages information’s should be easy to read and understand.

3. Calls to Action
Always make sure about add Call to Action for easy communication with your website visitor. A Call to Action should have in several pages and places in your website, both before the bottom and fold of homepage. It’s important to add your phone number and a hyperlink to your contact us page as a highlighted box. Make a website with attractive Call to Action.
When you put an email address or a phone number on the site, don’t upload this information as an image — the number or address should be able to be clicked on or copied right from the site in order to place the call or send an email conveniently and quickly. Nowadays most smart phones these days have the ability to do "Click to Call" options on the web, so make the process as easy as possible for users.

4. Mobile-Friendly Experience
At the end of 2012, nearly a quarter of Web traffic was from mobile and other smart devices. People will be looking at your website on their Personal computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. In this situation you must design your website with mobile and other smart device optimized. Most of the small business company making their websites as mobile responsive. It is important that your website is mobile-friendly or device responsive. There are two ways to do this. One is to create another website that would have a URL same to your website such as m.yourwebsite.com. These sites are created just for mobile devices and require a separate website, URL, host, domain, etc.

The most important thing, that is to make sure that your site is mobile friendly or device responsive because Google is now giving preference in ranking to sites that are device responsive.

5. Search Engine Optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the most important thing for your website; SEO will help you to appear your website on top position search engine tools like google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com. Search engines have two main functions: crawling and indexing sites, and search engine providing a ranked list of websites based on their relevance to the search term and keywords. You can use Google webmaster tools to manage your SEO tools and research on your website visitors.

Note: Google is the most uses search engine tool, Support for International search engines including market leaders such as Baidu, Rambler, Yandex, AUM and Naver are critical path for a successful SEO program at an enterprise level.

6. User-Friendly Functionality
You have to know that, most of the users are not familiar with website and its functionality they don’t know too much. You have to make your website very easy and user friendly functionality. How long does it take for your page to load? It’s also an important thing to consider, people never wait for a long time if your takes long during loading time. Are all the links working and not broken? Is the formatting of your site up to date? Make sure that your all links is properly working or not, always up to date your site.

Using flash is may detract from your site’s effectiveness. Flash is not SEO friendly and takes long time to load it makes slow your website. Most of the smartphones does not support flash display, so by using it, you may be alienating some of your mobile visitors.

7. Social Media Integration
Social media is the most visited sites today; your business must have social media awareness. Social media is massive in today’s connected business environment. Consumers expect to be able to communicate with businesses through social like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and more. Social media is an excellent way to reach your customers to learn more about you, connect with other fans, and get the information they need in order to decide to do business with you. If you observe social media as a serious and productive marketing tool for your business and you factor in time in your work week to connect with people through social media channels, the presence of social media buttons on your site is an absolute must have.

You’ll want to make sure your social media buttons are visible on every page of your website, so factor in how big or small the icons should be and their location.

8. Blog
Blog is the most strategic business communication tool for small business website that can help you to reach your potential clients and consumers. It establishes you as a subject-matter expert that can provide free valuable content to your customers, building your fan base of followers/readers. It will help you bring more traffic to your small business website and possibly convert those visitors into buyers.

9. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Your visitors have lots of questions. They will contact with you via email or phone to know about their questions, if you answer all potential question on FAQ page then they will understand clearly. Questions often revolve around materials and ingredients used, shipping information, company history, sizing (for apparel brands) and cancellation or return policies etc. FAQ sections serve multiple purposes. First, it’s a demonstration that people are using your site regularly, which increases your visible authority. Second, if your users are even slightly interested in your business, they have an easy place to find volumes of common information.

10. Subscription Invitations
Something to hold in thoughts while you build a small business commercial enterprise website is that a newsletter is a fantastic way of producing repeat enterprise for a small enterprise, tell your clients about upcoming promotions, gives and new services. Sending out a newsletter allows you to present yourself as a professional in your industry whilst offering your customers with precious information. The frequency of your publication will depend of the amount of content you may create. News letters may be sent out daily, weekly, bi-weekly or maybe monthly. Newsletters assist set up steady verbal exchange between you and your customers, additionally on-line publication signups give you the opportunity to construct an opt-in email list.

Shared from webtady.com

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How to Get More Visitors to Your Website

Webtady- web traffic

How to Get More Visitors to Your Website

Humans surfing the web have an almost infinite deliver of websites to pick from, what’s going to cause them to forestall and take a look at out your page over your competitors? Here are a few recommendations to drive visitors in your page.

Make sure you have got nicely written content that explains your commercial enterprise and offerings. Try to answer any questions that humans might also have virtually by means of reading your homepage. Spice it up with incredible, important pictures that are visually unique. Humans experience a website that is properly designed and clean to navigate thru. Study sites that enchantment to you, ask yourself what makes them attractive? Then attempt to comprise some of those standards into your own page.

When you have a commercial enterprise, attempt incorporating blogs or nearby occasions into your website. Those procedures are established strategies of bringing repeat site visitors for your site. If human beings understand they could examine something new every month and they revel in the content material they will come lower back.

In case you are an individual who makes a specialty of self-advertising attempt interviewing someone who’s popular and exciting. This can create an audience who will return for your web page looking forward to remarkable things. Catchy headlines will appeal to interest despite the fact that humans simply stop by and test the content material. Create unique subscribe best content and ask human beings to subscribe. whilst you write an electronic mail welcoming humans, be sure to let them recognize about your social media structures and that might inspire them to visit the ones web sites as well.

Look exact inside the eyes of search engines like Google and yahoo. Optimize your headline and content material URL. Using famous keywords will assist you come back up inside the pinnacle listings while someone do a search? An endorsed device is the Google key-word tool. The use of a sitemap and a SEO optimized platform will assist make your web page Google pleasant.

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Top 15 Free Website Builders

Create yours. All of those are free and easy.

Introduction:

Do you want a business website for your business? I know for starting you want to try free website builder. That’s why you should use the freewebsite builders for your first try. The advantage to build a free website is you don’t need to hire a developer or don’t have any special skill to create this website. Most popular WYSIWYG web builders features drag and drop option allowing to develop a website even a small kid can do it. You don’t need any programming skill to create a website using a website builder. In this post I will let you know about all the website builders you can use for your business website. Create your own business website today.

1. Wix:

Wix become the most popular website builder because of their search engine friendly HTML5 websites. Wix themes are building for small business, restaurants, online stores and artist such as musicians and photographers. Also they are optimized for mobile devices. It is absolutely free for use. Wix is affordable web development platform for small business.

2. Websitebuilder:

Websitebuilder also is a free website builder site. This website will allow you to create your business website absolutely for free. You can choose hundreds of great themes given to this site.
Website builder give you a free sub-domain name for your website but they will add their banner at footer as well as others.

3. IMCreator:

You can create your website in second with IM Creator. They have the simplest drag & drop editor. Their fee package offers you free domain name of second level and 50MB of storage. They are regularly updating their collections of website templates. IMCreator.com will look perfect on types of browsers and devices as well as mobile and TAB. So don’t be late, lets create a Website for business or personal use.

4. SiteBuilder:

This is a recently launch site. SiteBuilder.com can offer you a really amazing collection of free designed website themes and templates divided on many different categories. They also offer an easy drag and drop tool to build a website. Have many additional tools allow to build really amazing website and even create a blog to your website. There are many advantages for small business website.

5. Sitey:

Sitey also allow you to create a professional website for free. This website is quite new but same as other website builder. Sitey offers you 50MB storage; 5MB file upload and 1GB bandwidth in their free plan. They also give you database design and development services. You can also try it.

6. Weebly:

Weebly is for any kind of users. You don’t need any technical skills. More than 30 million website created by weebly. It is a very well-known and popular website builder all over the world. Weebly website builder and Web Design Company offer is too low. Their basic plan is Free to use.

7. Jimdo:

Jimdo’s website builder is the simplest website builder. It will remove all the hardest part and enable you to create your own professional website with their easiest features. It’s start journey in 2010 mostly for small business owners. You will get free sub-domain, 500MB of storages, Online Stores.

8. Ucraft:

Another website builder is ucraft. You can actually build a very nice looking site with ucraft. It allows you to create SEO friendly website. You can use ucarft for your personal or landing page websites.

9. Site123:

Sites123 allows you to create amazing website for your personal use using layout. You don’t need any design or coding skills for that. You just need to create an account and follow the instruction they provide and you are ready to go.

10. WebStarts:

It is another website builder that allow you to create up to 5 pages, limited web storage and bandwidth (10MB and 5GB/mo accordingly). They have offer pretty interesting collection of templates on their website from where you can actually select for you website.

11. Moonfruit:

Moonfruit have a bunch of creative template where you can use one for your website. It is a easy to use free website builder. It offer you 1 website with max 15 pages on a second level domain, 20MB of storage and 1GB bandwidth, no customer support.

12. Webnode:

You can also use webnode for your personal use. It offers 1 GB bandwidth, 10 MB storage space. They will also you free mobile version of your site.

13. Webs:

You can also create your free website with webs. It has a very impressive drag & drop features. They will provide you 1 website as well as mobile version, limited to 500MB bandwidth and 40MB storage space. Also web store items will be limited to 5 items for FREE plan.

14. Yola:
Yola is very interesting website builder. They Will Provide 5 Websites Instead Of Standard 1, Banner-Free Hosting, Quality Customer Support, Build-In Website Statistic And 1GB Storage Per Site.

15. Ezweb123:

Ezweb123 also provide you the FREE website you want for you business website. It will provide you 1 website with up to 15 pages on a second level domain, 20MB storage space, 1GB monthly bandwidth. You can also go with this website.

Conclusion:
All of those website builders are really amazing for create a website very easy and fast. So guys don’t be late to build your own website. Finally I want to refer you to see our affordable website design packages and so on.

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How To Build a Small Business Website Using WordPress – Step by Step Guide

You are running your local small business for a decade. In past we do not need any small business website or small business web designer for our small business shop. We have to take a shop for our small business and drive the local customer by advertisement or sales representative. But now in the modern age things is very different. Now we need a small business web designer or web developer for getting customer for your small business websites.

Believe me I am also a small business owner. I have a shop now running almost 14 years locally. I choose the old method advertising by locally and by my own for getting customer. But I was struggling as I didn’t get many customers as previous time. I was become very worried for my shop as I have to earn for running my family. One day a young aged customer came to my shop and asked for my shop website address for online information and shopping. Believe me I have no idea about small business website and how it’s work etc.

Later that night I came home and search online for set up a small business website and custom website design price all this stuff. After researching about 2-3 days (I didn’t remember the time exactly) I understand and know the steps for making a small business website with WordPress and How important a custom responsive website become for a small or large business for getting customer. So I am just sharing my experience and how you will get a small business website.

How to Build a Small Business Website For Free:

Step #1: Choose your platform for your small business website

A Website Platform is a website in which additional functionality can be seamlessly integrated by means of an external application programming interface (API). The platform should provide integration points. These integration points are places in the application where new functionality can be plugged in.

Well when I search on net about it I came to know that previously many website were in HTML, CSS and Flash. Need a lot of time to learn it. That’s why previously many hire a small business website designer and developer for their real estate business, small business, church website or even online shopping website because they don’t have the time to learn all the stuff. But things are easier now. You can have your own attorney general, online shopping or business website by our own. In recent time there were many content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.

What is CMS?

Well content management system is a user- friendly platform for building websites and managing by your own. You don’t have to learn the coding. You just have to put your content in the right place to get start. Below is the Free CMS provider.

But not every platform is easy to use. I am giving you statics about most popular platform in 2016.

As you can see WordPress is the most user and popular platform. Almost half of the small business website, photography website, real estate website, restaurant website, dental website is running on WordPress now. I also prefer WordPress because of the user-friendly interface.

You guys are wondering why I am choosing WordPress right? So here the explanation about it:

Why WordPress is most popular platform?

Easy to use and learn

It is extremely easy to learn. You don’t need to be a developer or designer for use a WordPress. You don’t need to learn any programming language for that. You just have to know the functionality of each option. That’s all.

Cutting-Edge and Update plugins

Without- even write a single line of code you can actually add any functionality in your website. WordPress offer a large number of free plugins for your website that you can add it for free. WordPress has introduced some of the amazing plugins, such as Word fence, Visual Form Builder, And Infinite SEP a lot more. Also there are many WordPress themes which you can actually get for free.

Mobile-optimized platform

You know many of the users are using via mobile. Mobile becomes a part of our life. So you can have a mobile-optimized platform in here. It also offers you a large amount of tools for adding you website for free.

Fully Customization

You can edit any where anything in WordPress. If you want to update content or change anything you just have to go to that option and change it. No need any coding for that.

And Many More
You can see the benefits of using WordPress more in here WordPress Features

You can also use the Drupal or Joomla for you website. But I prefer the WordPress most.

Joomla

Joomla is an open source platform on which Web sites and applications can be created. It is a content management system (CMS) which connects your site to a MySQL, MySQL, or PostgreSQL database in order to make content management and delivery easier on both the site manager and visitor. See more at Joomla

Drupal

Drupal is free, open source software that can be used by individuals or groups of users — even those lacking technical skills to easily create and manage many types of Web sites. The application includes a content management platform and a development framework. See more at Drupal

If you are a beginner for small business website, photography website, real estate website, restaurant website, dental website or even your portfolio website than you should go with WordPress. It has amazing themes for business, photography, travel, personal blog etc.

Step #2: Choosing a Hosting and Domain for small business website

What is Hosting

Think about a land to buy for your small business in internet. Hosting is just like that. A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. See more atWeb Hosting

What is Domain

Think about having a property name for your small business website. Domain is just like that. In general, a domain name represents an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, a server computer hosting a web site, or the web site itself or any other service communicated via the Internet. See more at Web Domain

To get a new website for your small business it is very important to choose you domain name properly. I usually use Host gator for hosting and GoDaddy for domain. There is lot of service provider for this. But I prefer to go with the best one. I am giving you the screen shot of the packages for hosting and domain. You can visit Hostgator for hosting and GoDaddy Domains for domain to read more.

Packages for Hostgator (Hosting)

You have to choose a plan to get started. I prefer to use the business plan for your website. There are many benefits to use a business plan.

Benefits of Using a Business Plan

Dedicated I.P

Free Private SSL

Free Toll-free number

Packages for GoDaddy (Domain)

This is only the demo. You domain name price will be go up and down in respect to your domain name selection.

What will be my domain name for my small business website ?

• If you are making a website for your business so it will be best to go with your company name. It will help you to brand your company.
• If you are making a website for yourself then choosing your name for domain is the best option for you.

Normally people use .Com for the website. But you can also choose .net, .org, .info for you business website.

Difference Between (.Com, .Net, .Org, .Info)

.COM is used primarily for commercial businesses.

.NET for network related organizations.

.ORG is for nonprofit groups.

. Net is for informative type websites.

My Best Advice will be go with the normal one and most widely use .COM. And your domain name should be brand able, Memorable and catchy.

Now the most important thing is to adding a domain name in the hosting account. As I use Hostgator for my website so I will show it for Hostgator.

How to add domain to hostgator

If you want to add a new domain name to your HostGator account then follow these steps.

• First login to cPanel using your login ID and password.
• Then under the Domains section, you will find Addon Domains button. Click on the Addon Domains button.

• Next you need to enter the domain name, FTP username for the domain, document root and password. You can use any FTP username. Just make sure there is no FTP user with the same name already exists. If the FTP username is already linked with some other domain then you will see the error message. I prefer to use domain name as root directory and place it under the home directory.

You can enter the password or you have an option to generate the password.

• When everything is entered correctly, click on the Add Domain button. You will see the success message of adding domain like following.

If there is any error then the error reason is also shown. Fix the error and try again.

Now you know how to add a new domain to your HostGator account. Go to browser and make sure that your new domain is working properly. See more at Hostgator Support

Now as you are done with your domain and hosting now you can go to the next part Platform installation.

I will show you how to setup a WordPress platform for your small business website.

Step #3: How to install WordPress and WordPress themes

Install

There are two types of WordPress installation.

• One click installation
• Manually

Almost 99% people is going with the One clink installation. It is very easy to install.

Steps for Installing WordPress:

• Log in to your hosting account.
• Go to your control panel.
• Look for the “Quick Install” icon.

• In the left menu, under Popular Installs, click WordPress, then click Install WordPress:

• Complete the form that appears with the following details:

Your WordPress platform should be ready. You can see more details in here Hostgator Support if you are not getting it done.

You can see how to create small business website with WordPress in my upcoming writing where I describe all the function in details about how to build website with WordPress. This article is all about building a platform with WordPress.

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