First you need to figure out what you actually want for your .com, .org domain etc.

We recommend searching here to make sure your desired domain is available. If you’re looking to buy a domain that someone already owns are has even established a money-making website for you can checkout this site.

Try to keep your domain name relevant, short and easy to remember.

Now you’ll actually need hosting in order to store and share your domain and website with the world. We highly recommend BlueHost. When signing up for either of those hosts you also signup for the domain at the same time for convenience.

It does matter what hosting you get. If you decide to shop around you should at least look for Linux based hosting that fully supports WordPress. You may not know what that means, just keep an eye out for it when reviewing options. We recommend avoiding Windows based hosts and GoDaddy.

2. Get WordPress and Theme

WordPress is the most popular open source (free) blog and website CMS (Content Management System) software around and we highly recommend it. Essentially, it allows you to add, edit and manage pages, posts, tags, categories and many other settings and features for the behind-the-scenes part of a website known as the back-end. If you’ve ever used Word, it’s just about that easy to edit pages.

Many hosts including our recommended picks allow easy one-click installations of WordPress (Not Recommended). If you’d like a little more control here’s how to manually install. Or you can hire us to professionally and securely install WordPress for you.

Now, for the design (front-end), you’ll need a theme. We highly recommend our own SuperSimple theme. To install WordPress themes is very simple:

From your WordPress admin menu navigate to:

Appearance > Themes > Install Themes > Upload > Then Browse to the Theme Zip File and Click Install Now > Then Click Activate

3. Get Skills, Help and Pro Services

Now that your website is in place you’ll likely want to customize the look and features. As for the look, start here. For features you can install from a selection of over 15k plugins that add advanced capabilities to your website. Here’s how to install a plugin.

For help and website discussion, register for the forum. And here is a forum specifically for beginners.

And if you want to take your website to the very next level of professionalism in web design, graphic design, SEO, marketing and so much more we highly recommend calmest_ghostDESIGN for web services.

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Subscribe to our blog to keep up with the latest: http://tidythemes.com/feed/

To see the latest changes (to see if you’d even like to upgrade or not) and instructions for requesting the latest theme version see the changelog.

IMPORTANT NOTE

It’s important to understand that even though we continue to upgrade our themes this isn’t to imply that we recommend you upgrade all your projects to the latest theme version. We just want you to have access to the latest version for future projects you may have. You should learn more about our concept first.

If you don’t care and want to get on with upgrading already please take caution and read carefully the following:

http://tidythemes.com/concept/#upgrading

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Appearance > Themes > Install Themes > Upload > Then Browse to the Theme Zip File and Click Install Now > Then Click Activate

Install manually via FTP or host file manager:

- Connect via FTP or log into your file manager
- Navigate to public_html (if not already inside this folder) and then wp-content/themes
- Unzip your theme package (named either BlankSlateX.X.zip or SuperSimpleX.X.zip)
- Upload your theme folder (named either blankslate or supersimple) into the themes folder
- Finally, go to Appearance > Themes in your admin and Activate your theme

NOTES:

- You will need to contact your host if you’re unsure how to use FTP (they’re all different)
- X.X represents whatever version number you’re currently using
- You can now simply edit all your theme files locally in Notepad or TextEdit (or something more advanced) and then upload them via FTP so that you always have a backup locally automatically and can easily undo mistakes

The following issue only effects versions older than BlankSlate 2.0 and SuperSimple 1.5…

Uploading via FTP will cause the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ':' in /wp-content/themes/supersimple/functions.php on line 1

This was due to the way in which the themes were minified, saved and uploaded which has since been fixed.

Thanks, TidyThemes

If you’d rather get a jump-start with CSS instead of learning from the ground up you can purchase the SuperSimple theme framework which is only $10.

If you’ve got time to learn, not to fear, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is easier to learn that you might think.

What is CSS?

CSS is a style sheet (coding) language used primarily to style HTML in websites and webpages, colors, fonts, divs (boxes), padding, borders, margins, background images and more.

How to Specify Areas to Style?

With selectors, generally ids, classes and HTML tags. The syntax is: selector{property:value}

IDs

In CSS: #whatever{color:#fff}
(an ID is to be used only once per page)

In HTML: <div id="whatever"> ...content... </div>

Classes

In CSS: .whatever{color:#fff}
(a class can be used for repeating style on pages)

In HTML: <div class="whatever"> ...content... </div>

HTML Tags

When styling established HTML tags there is no need for a # or .

Whether it’s html, body, header, nav, article, footer, p, a or whatever, you just style it as is:

body{color:#fff}

How to Find Your Site’s Selectors in Order to Style Them?

Meet your two new best friends:

• Firefox Web Browser
• Firebug Add-on for Firefox
• Inspect Element for Chrome and Safari work similarly
• Internet Explorer users, switch to a better web browser (choose one mentioned above), only use IE for testing browser-compatibility

Once you have that setup Firebug is very easy to use:

- Click on the bug icon, you can’t miss it (Firebug panel will open)
- Top left of the panel, click on the little blue arrow/pointer
- Now hover anywhere over your page and you’ll be able to highlight different sections
- Click on the area you want to gather selector and style info from
- You can now test new styles in real-time before actually making the changes in your stylesheet

Let’s Get Down to the Styling Shall We?

First to get to your theme’s stylesheet, from the admin go to:

Appearance > Editor > Stylesheet (style.css)

Common Styles

Set the main font for your pages: body{font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif}
see web safe fonts

Set the main font color for pages (adding to the above):
body{font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;color:#555}
see hex colors

Set the text link style for pages:

a{font-family:georgia,'times new roman',serif;color:#09f;text-decoration:none}
a:hover{text-decoration:underline}

Set a background image: body{url(IMAGE-URL-HERE)}
(upload images to the Media area in the WP admin then copy the image URL)

Hiding Stuff

If you’re not quite comfortable digging into the PHP code of your files to alter the look or remove things just yet or you simply are not sure if you want to make permanent changes or only want to make post/page by post/page changes you can use this quick and dirty trick to hide anything:

.whatever{display:none}

Specificity

Specificity is often the most difficult concept of CSS to grasp at first. Here’s a quick breakdown.

- CSS is read from top to bottom, so if you had .box{color:red} at the top of the stylesheet and .box{color:blue} at the bottom, the snippet that declares a blue color will take precedence because it is read last and has the last say, the box will be blue.

- However, if the snippet that declares the red color was more specific it might take precedence. For example body #content .box{color:red}

- If you ever find that a CSS style you’re implementing absolutely will not stick you might try the !important declaration .box{color:red !important}

Lots More to Learn

Completely Learn CSS | Check Your Work | CSS3 | Visit Us in the CSS Help Forum

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1. We recommend seeing if your domain is available via Domain Tools.

2. We recommend registering your domain at the same time you signup for hosting via BlueHost, that comes at our very highest recommendation. Signup Now

it’s not just a recommendation, it is important what you use to whether your website will fully function, Linux and PHP5+ are very important

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