Having a website in order to “showcase” your business is today essential! It will often represent the first contact between your potential future guests and your hotel/hostel. It’s then very important to sell you well and offer a professional, clear and complete website. While hotels from big chains have costly and complex websites, independent ones can not always afford them. But good news! Today, thanks to WordPress you can easily create and manage your own website for less than 150€. Curious to know how this works exactly?
1. Register your domain name and Subscribe to a server hosting solution
For both of them you can use for example Gandi or OVH. It should cost you around 20€ to register your domain name (choosing your website adress, for example “www.yourwebsitename.com”), and 30€/year for the most basic hosting solution (on Gandi it seems more expensive, but when you will register your domain name, they will send you then a -50% voucher per via email for the hosting service).
2. Install WordPress on your server
You can choose to pay more for your hosting service and subscribe to a solution where you will be assisted to install WordPress. However, I give you below I give you the instructions to do it yourself, as it is not “so” complicated, but be ready prepared to be very careful and to follow each step one by one meticulously 🙂
- Create the SQL database on your server (Gandi or OVH): once you are subscribed to a hosting solution, go on into the back office of your server using your access login and password, and follow the steps indicated to create a “SQL database”.
- Download a FTP solution (for example “Filezilla” which is free): this software will allow you to send the files from your computer to the server which hosts your website. Once you have installed the software, connect it to your server using the information “FTP codes” sent by via e-mail by your server (Gandi or OVH).
- Download the WordPress pack on from www.wordpress.org, unzip it and follow the famouxs “5 minutes / 5 steps to install WordPress”. You will find many different versions of it on Google, find the one which you understand the best and follow it carefully. You will have to change information of the “config-wp” file using the information from the SQL database that you have created previously (“localhost” is the server address of this database).
- Upload your modified WordPress pack into the “www” file using the Filezilla software that you installed and connected to your server previously.
- Go to www.yourwebsitename.com/wp-admin/install and follow the steps to subscribe to WordPress and access your WordPress back-office interface. Welcome to the wonderful WordPress world, congratulations!
3. Choose a theme and start to playing!
You can browse Google to find out a free or premium theme for your website. For example Clean Retina or Spacious are two nice, responsive and free themes offered by WordPress that you will be able to easily personalise. It’s important to rather choose a responsibe web deisgn theme. Responsive means that the theme provides an optimal viewing experience, making it easy to navigate from a wide range of devices (computer, tablet, smartphone…).
When you have found it, upload it through Filezilla to the file www/wp-content/themes and it will magically appear in the Appearence/Theme section of your WordPress back-office interface. You will find many tutorials on Internet about how to use WordPress, learn about its specific vocabulary (Plugin, Widget, Sidebar etc…), and customize your theme. The best way to learn is to dive in it deeply and go chasinglook for the missing information that you will need yourself surfing on the Internet!
Enjoy it! And keep in mind that there is almost always a solution out there waiting for you!