Create a Professional Commerical Website on WordPress for Less than US$150
Setting up a professional looking commercial website – that must be time consuming and expensive – right?
Wrong!
a friend Shaun McGavin and I recently set up a professional commercial website for Shaun’s photography business. We set it up over 3 or 4 evenings, around 3 hours per evening. It cost less than US$150 to set it up, which included the domain name, hosting, and theme. Check out the end result at Big Jungle Photography.
How did we do it?
- We spent the first evening brainstorming a name for the photography website and confirming that the internet domain name (www.bigjunglephotography.com) was available.
- The website was built on the WordPress blogging platform. Note, that while the Big Jungle Photography website is not a blog, it still uses WordPress as its website content management system. WordPress is open source, so no charge for the software. We enlisted the help of Ninja Blog Setup to perform the technical installation of the WordPress platform. Ninja is a fantastic service – you organise your website hosting and domain name through Ninja. You pay for the hosting, but not for Ninja’s setup. Ninja sets up WordPress in exchange for the affiliate link commission received when hosting is initiated through his website. At first the WordPress installation appears as a vanilla blog site.
- There are many free screen design themes for WordPress, however, for the most part these are designed for blogs. We came across some good commercial themes for WordPress from StudioPress. Unfortunately Shaun had to pay for the theme he picked, but that was the last time he took out his credit card!
- No software programming was required (although we did tweak small parts of the existing php code in the theme to suit Shaun’s requirements).
- From there it was a matter of tuning the website as Shaun wanted it – configuring the theme, loading the photographs, writing the text, tidying bits here and there. We also submitted the website sitemap to be indexed by Google and setup Google Analytics to track the number of visits to the site.
So there you go – not expensive, not too much time, and a lot of fun setting it up. No need for an expensive website design company.
Shaun has recently moved to London, England. If you live in that area and want some great photography done, particularly of children and pets, then find out more about Shaun’s photography service at Big Jungle Photography.
Contact me if you have any further questions or want some help setting up a commercial website like Big Jungle Photography.
See the quick demo of the Big Jungle Photography website below.
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