I like to think of building a WordPress website as building your online house.
Every house needs:
- Land to sit on
- A foundation
- Framing
- A roof
- Exterior finishes
- Interior finishes
Here’s how that translates into your WordPress website.
- The land the house occupies is like your site’s domain name and hosting package. Just as you need a place to site your house in the real world, you need virtual real estate on which to grow your online house.
- Your home’s foundation might be a concrete slab, or maybe a poured concrete basement. Either way, it needs to provide a strong, level structure to support everything that goes on top of it. The foundation for your WordPress website is WordPress itself. It’s the program that creates the foundation on which everything else is built.
- The next construction step is framing. This gives the building its shape and height, and supports the roof. In website terms, the theme you choose gives your website shape and strongly influences its look and feel.
- Your roof protects your house and its contents from storms. WordPress’ security features and plugins provide the same kind of protection for your website.
- Exterior finishes include elements like siding and windows. Plugins help to define the structure.
- Last but by no means least are your interior finishes – flooring, ceilings, walls, colors and textures. That’s your site’s content.
These are the six building blocks for your WordPress website. Each one is necessary for your site to work well, attract readers and function as it should. Here at WordPress Building Blocks we’ll be talking about all of them.
For more information about the building blocks of WordPress, sign up for the six-part email series How to Build Your Online House with WordPress