Best software for website design for beginners?
Best free or cheap web design software
What software are people using for web design these days?
Best wordpress tutorial to reach a professional level
It's an excellent idea and WordPress is perfect for clients who will most probably not be very tech-savvy (imo WP's greatest strength is its admin panel usability). If you aren't familiar with PHP or MySQL, you should try to learn the basics of them first. MySQL is usually administered through a phpmyadmin-interface, which is kinda easy to use.
Disclaimer: I'm writing this to refresh my own memory, as I've been doing other shit for a few months.
I started working with custom WP sites a year ago and this is what I recommend to get your head around it:
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If you haven't already, download the latest version of WP from wordpress.org and extract it to a folder on your server. You'll also need a mysql db running, but I will assume you know how to pull this off, it is another guide completely. Visit the wordpress/ directory from your browser and go through the initial configuration of the site as you prefer. You can change everything later through the admin panel if need be.
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Learn how a theme is built / works in WordPress. This is the most important bit, imo. The WP documentation is often refered because it is usually very complete. Reading this and other "real" guides is probably wiser than reading my comment if you can easily digest it.
Themes are what you will be playing the most with during your development. Now, there are a many ways to build a theme and as WP is using PHP, you can come up with all sorts of crazy/optimal ways to build, but I'll try to sum up the basics for a quick overview:
Each theme resides is their own folder located in the wordpress/wp-content/themes/ directory. A quick note about the folders: /wp-content/ is the one you will be adding stuff to, such as themes and plugins. The only other place you will touch is the wordpress/wp-config.php file, usually.
Each theme must have a default stylesheet called style.css that you can either use as your main stylesheet, or whatever you want. AFAIK, it must exist because that's where you put the name of your theme so that WP knows about it (can probably be bypassed but idk). It's placed in the root of the themes folder, e.g. /wp-content/themes/myawesometheme/style.css.
The "theme name" definition in style.css is a comment at the top of the file and looks like this:
/* Theme Name: Twenty Thirteen */
Now there are a bunch of other stuff you can specify here such as author, description, etc. But the theme name is the important part, right.
Next is how the HTML actually comes together. In your themefolder you have the "optional" (I've never made a theme without one) functions.php file that defines a lot of special options, functions you will use, custom post types (you'll get to that later). I don't think I need to get into that now, but it will be important for you to learn.
A page is (in my experience) created by combining a header.php and footer.php. This can be done by doing something like this in index.php (example):
<?php get_header(); ?> <h1>Hello world!</h1> <?php get_footer(); ?>
The header.php usually contains whatever top HTML code you use in your theme: the <!DOCTYPE html><html>, <head></head> (with meta tags etc), open <body> tag and most of the time, the menu / navigation code at the top of the document. The navigation comes from a menu that you will have created in the admin panel of your site, it can then be refered in the header.php by calling wp_nav_menu:
<?php wp_nav_menu(array(options)); ?>
The footer.php (usually) has some <script> tags and it also closes the body and html tags. If your theme has a footer, it will also be here (it could of course be imported from a different file).
Plugins are usually installed via the admin panel. They can also be downloaded and placed in /wp-content/plugins/. Some final tips I can think of:
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Do not rely on plugins to do shit if you can avoid it. With too many plugins, the site is considerably slowed down and the security risks increase for each plugin you add (they are maintained by whoever made them; they are usually not security experts and sometimes there are vulnerabilities, even in the most used plugins). Also, sometimes development on a plugin stops and the functionality might stop working altogether when WordPress/another plugin gets updated.
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Don't be afraid to use plugins when they will help you a lot. When developing for random business clients, some of my most common plugins were: Contact Form 7, Advanced Custom Fields (usually refered to as ACF), Registered users only (basically with this active you need a user+pw to view the site), a good security plugin (I don't know what's good right now), a good SEO plugin (same).
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The Duplicator plugin is a godsend when you need to deploy/transfer WP sites. It creates a zip file and a installer.php file for you to just run from a folder on the target environment, very straight forward.
Now uhh, as my memory becomes clearer, I realize there's a shit-ton of more information to learn before you finally "get it". It will be much easier if you try to develop a complete site and search for solutions/information when you feel you need it. I'm gonna post one more example of something very vital:
How to display content. Alright, so the content of your site will consist of two things in the admin panel: pages and posts. Pages can use specific template files (e.g. template-contact.php) or the default page.php file. It is also common to have a "front page" that always uses the front-page.php file. Other guides should teach you how to accomplish this. Actually, posts and pages can use a bunch of different files, depending on how the theme is built. Check out the template hierarchy documentation. It will be confusing.
Anyway, what I wanted to say about content, that I haven't touched upon yet, is "The Loop". The loop can look like this:
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<section class="content">
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php echo the_content(); ?>
</section>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>and is usually how you get stuff to show. I'm tired now and I need sustenance... I probably confused the shit out of you if you read all of this, but I hope it helps you "get it" in the long run lol. If I missed something very important or totally fucked up somewhere, please comment and I will correct it! /end horrible introduction to wordpress themes
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Hello,
Which of the following is the best software for building a fully functional website that works on various device resolutions:
Figma
Adobe Xd
Adobe Dreamweaver
Note: I have no coding experience and no web designing experience, but I seek to make an excellent website for my startup.