The other day, because I didn’t have enough on my plate, I built a new design site, shut down Sweet Faerie Designs and opened Carrie Loves Design. It took all day, from buying the domain name, hosting, setting up WP, and customizing a design to creating new social media accounts and setting up back-end reporting. It’s a process, and now I’m much more comfortable in what I charge for this service.
So, what did it take to get a WordPress site up and running from nothing to tah-dah?
- Purchase domain name, you can get one (or, lots of them) reasonably price at GoDaddy or NameCheap.
- Purchase hosting, I host through SiteGround and could not be happier!
- Install WordPress, most hosts have a 1-click install that makes this very easy.
- Install WP theme
- Customize WP for you
- Customize theme – this is where a HUGE chunk of time is dedicated
- Create logo/branding/graphics for new site
- Install, activate and set-up all of your must-haveĀ plugins.
- Use anything but the default permalinks
- Add About, Contact, and other Pages
- Customize a menu/navigation bar
- You may or may not need to do this, depending on the type of site you are creating – create & populate Portfolio
- Make sure things out in the Interwebs are working for you, not against you
- Create Facebook page (or, in my case submit request to change name, update email & website info.) create new profile picture
- Create Twitter account (or, change name, update email & website info.) hopefully use same profile picture as FB update color scheme
- Set up Google Analytics – get the code + id.
- Redirect old website URL to new URL
Some other things I learned along the way:
- Know & Love FileZilla. You’re welcome.
- Patience is key.
- Remember to eat and drink water… you’ll start to feel wonky if you don’t.

Cindy Whitehead says
I love that you changed the name – I love it! (-: And yes, it is a LOT of work doing a new site – I still have my binder of notes, ideas, “test” pages we did, etc from when you did mine a few months ago – I feel so lucky to have met and worked with you, every time I look at my blog (which is every day!) I still can’t believe it – it rocks thanks to you!
Julie Hawkins says
Did you seriously do this in one day?! Took me weeks!! The new site looks great š