How to design a news website using WordPress

Has become easy these days to create and design a news website on the Internet to transmit and display news in one specific field or many fields, thanks to the development of methods for creating, designing and managing websites, including the method of creating a website through the WordPress content management system.

As a result, the number of people who aspire to create and design successful news websites has increased, and that is why we will explain to you in detail in this article the best and easiest way to create and design a news website, starting with choosing the site’s topic, going through the technical steps to create it through WordPress, and ending with monetizing site visits to profit from it.

Why do you decide to design your news website using WordPress?

WordPress is currently the best way to create various types of websites, including news websites, and this is due to the technical features it has, which enable it to greatly facilitate the creation and design of a news website, as well as to the fact that it is a completely free and open source system.

When you use WordPress to create, design, and manage your news website, you will not need to write a lot of code. In fact, you may not need to write any code at all, and you will not need to pay a web developer in most cases, and this saves You have to spend a large amount of money.

WordPress also provides many tools and features that make it easier to manage news sites and publish content very quickly, such as:

A very powerful and easy-to-use news (and non-news) article editor.
Excellent media tools that enable you to publish photos and videos accompanying the news.
The most recent news articles are displayed at the top by default, which is ideal for news sites.
The ability to add functionality to the site according to what you want through WordPress plugins .
The ability to modify or completely change the design of the news website based on hundreds of free templates .

There are also many other features and tools available in WordPress that make it much easier for you to manage your news website and publish news on it. More useful features and tools are being added to it continuously, and of course you will be able to use them for your website in the future.

Steps to create and design a news website

The process of creating and designing a news website includes a set of technical and non-technical steps, and all of these steps must be implemented professionally in order to ensure the success of the website, especially with the significant increase in the number of news websites, and thus the increased difficulty of competition.

Therefore, we will explain to you here in detail all the steps involved in the process of creating a news website, and we will focus more on the steps that determine the design and appearance of the news website in order for you to be able to create a website with a unique design that does not greatly resemble the appearance of the rest of the news websites spread on the Internet.

But before we explain the steps in detail, we will first list them in the following list, so that you have an initial idea of how to create and design a professional news website:

Choose the topic of the news site.
Get a domain name.
Get web hosting.
Installing WordPress on hosting.
Installation and design of a distinctive news template.
Install the necessary plugins.
Learn how to write and publish news.
Promote the site and get visits.
Monetize visits to profit from the news site.

Step 1: Choose the topic of the news site

The subject or specialty of the news site determines how many steps should be carried out when creating it. The method of implementing the steps for creating and designing a news site may differ slightly from one specialty to another in terms of the necessary additions, appropriate design, and so on.

Therefore, before starting to create your news website, you must first determine the field or fields that you want to cover, that is, will you publish political news, or will you publish economic news, or will you publish scientific news, or will you publish news in another field, or will you publish news in multiple fields.

If you will manage your news site yourself, and you do not prefer to employ or cooperate with a number of people in management, preparation, and publishing, we do not recommend covering more than one specialty, as this will be very difficult or impossible for you. However, if you will cooperate with other people, It can cover as many specializations as you deem appropriate.

While choosing the specialty of your news site, be sure to follow the following tips, as this will be useful to you in the future, and will make it easier for you to carry out the work and manage the site:

Choose a specialty or specializations that you and your team are passionate about, as this will help you continue working.
Identify a niche that has an audience in order to get enough traffic, and leverage it to achieve your goal.
Don’t choose a topic that is difficult to compete and top the search results for, as this will increase your likelihood of failure.
Make sure that the specialty you will cover is appropriate for what you want to invest the site in, whether profit or otherwise.

When choosing the specialty of the news site you want to create, never rely on your data expectations. Rather, look for real data, even if it requires you to pay some money, and then decide based on it. Of course, you do not want your site to fail for the simple reason that you expected great interest from the audience. In that specialty, but that was not true.

Step 2: Get a domain name

The domain name is one of the most important requirements for creating and designing a news website on WordPress, as it serves as the address that enables visitors to access the site through their browsers. It is necessary to choose and obtain a domain name suitable for the topic of the news website so that it is easy for followers to remember and enter it into the browser bar. When they want to see the latest news.

A domain name can be obtained in many free and paid ways, but the free methods do not provide a professional domain that instills confidence in the site in the hearts of visitors, and therefore it is necessary to obtain a paid domain from one of the good companies that provide domain names, which we mentioned in the article ( The best sites to buy a domain at a cost low ).

It is also worth noting that some web hosting companies provide a professional domain name within their plans as part of the hosting plan’s benefits, and this domain can be used for the news site, but we would also like to point out that this feature usually comes with a hidden financial cost, so it may be preferable to purchase a domain name. Separately, purchasing hosting does not provide a free domain name.

Step 3: Get web hosting

Web hosting is also one of the main requirements for creating and designing a news website, just like a domain name, as it is not possible to create a website without it, because all the files, content and data of the website that enable visitors to browse it, see the news, and watch photos and videos are stored in it, and sent to them when they request it.

There are many types and hosting plans that web hosting service providers provide to website owners, and a cheap shared hosting plan is usually suitable at first, but it is preferable to obtain flexible cloud hosting that provides high performance and reliability for the website.

Digital Ocean provides high-quality cloud hosting with plans starting at $5 per month. This company can be relied upon to obtain fast and reliable hosting in order to run all sizes and types of websites, including small news sites with low traffic and huge news sites that get… Thousands of visits daily.

Step 4: Install WordPress on the hosting

After obtaining the domain name and hosting, you must install the WordPress content management system through which you will create, manage and design the news website on the hosting, as this system allows you to perform all these tasks with great ease and without programming experience.

There are many ways to install WordPress on web hosting, and the method of doing so may differ depending on the web hosting control panel used, but usually the main steps in all methods are the same, and we have explained two of these methods in the article ( How to download and install WordPress on hosting ). You can view the article and install WordPress by following the steps detailed in it.

Step 5: Install and design a distinctive news template

After installing WordPress on web hosting, the step comes in which the appearance of the news site is determined, which is to install a suitable news template for the site and modify its design to become a perfect or almost perfect fit for what you want, relying on a set of tools and methods that enable modification to the WordPress template.

There are many ways through which you can obtain a WordPress news template, including:

You can download a news template for free from the templates page on the official WordPress website, or from the free professional templates page suitable for news sites that we have modified to be compatible with Arabic sites.
You can also purchase a WordPress news template for a sum of money ranging from tens of dollars to a few hundred dollars through one of the sites specialized in selling WordPress templates, such as the Picalica website .
You can also hire a developer or development team to create and design a custom and unique news template for you. In this case, you will never need to modify the design of the news template, but that costs a lot of money.

Whether you get a WordPress template for free or buy one from a website, you can install it on your site using one of the methods described in our article ( installing a WordPress template through 3 easy methods ), and then you can modify the design of the news site depending on the features, options, and customization methods available that can Using it, we will shed light on that in the next paragraph.

How to design a news website

If you want to design a news website template for WordPress from scratch yourself instead of hiring a developer, we advise you to review our comprehensive guide on this topic ( Explanation of designing and customizing WordPress templates from start to finish ), as we have explained in detail how to design WordPress templates based on the web development languages used. In the WordPress content management system.

If you have installed a ready-made WordPress news template on your site and want to modify its design, there are many ways to do that, the most important of which is the method that relies on the website appearance customization tool, as this tool is easy to use, and its options are usually sufficient for most news sites in the event of Use a template that has good customization options.

In order to use the customization tool to modify the design of the WordPress news website template, activate the template that selects the appearance that best suits what you want, then place the mouse cursor on the (Appearance) option in the side menu of the main page of the WordPress backend, then click on the (Customize) option from the menu drop down that appears.

**Go to the customization tool that allows you to change the design of the news site**

You will be taken directly to the WordPress theme customization tool that enables you to change the design of your news site through a set of appearance-related options, including options for specifying colors and shapes, showing and hiding elements, giving them specific effects, and more.

There is also a section in the customization tool that displays a live preview of the news site design, where you will be able to see directly how the option you selected will display your site in this section without having to leave the tool or go to the home page or any other page of the site.

**News website design options and live preview section in the customizer**

The design and appearance options provided by the customization tool in WordPress vary depending on the template used, meaning that the template is what determines the extent to which the design of the news site can be changed. Therefore, if you want a highly customizable news site, be sure to choose a news template that has many and powerful customization options.

There are also many other ways that enable you to modify the design of a news website other than the customization tool, and you can learn about them by reviewing the article ( Explanation of how to modify a WordPress template in 5 different ways ), in which we have shed light on the best methods that allow that.

Tips to follow while designing a news website

You can make the modifications you want to the design of the news website through the customization tool or any other way to show it in its best appearance and make it attractive to visitors, but in order to ensure that the design and therefore the project does not fail, follow as much as possible the following important tips:

Create a clear and appropriate horizontal navigation menu for the news site that will benefit the visitor and make it easier for him to access the information he wants.
Text and background colors should be contrasting to make it easier for the visitor to read the news. It is preferable to use black for text and white for background.
Be sure to include a large number of pages that list news (for example, the home page), and if possible make the site show more news as you go down.
Dedicate a section in a prominent place on the site that displays breaking news, as this will keep visitors coming back to your site for the latest updates.
Use sidebars to display groups of news that might be of interest to the visitor, such as the most read news, news related to the news the visitor is reading, and so on.
Make sure to make the site mobile-friendly , as many people prefer to know news through their smart devices, and of course you want to please them.
Be careful to use consistent colors and beautiful designs that will appeal to visitors.
Add a section where readers can leave comments expressing their opinions on the news.
Allocate multiple places for images on the home page and news pages.

Also, while designing the news site, you must stay away from anything that hinders the visitor’s experience and makes it bad, as this will reflect poorly on the site. If you want to know the extent of the impact of something on visitors’ behavior, you can use the A/B test that we explained in our article ( Explanation of the test A/B completely, and conducted on the WordPress site .

Step 6: Install the necessary plugins

WordPress plug-ins or WordPress add-ons are the main feature that makes the system powerful, as they allow website owners to add functions that WordPress does not provide by default to their sites without the need to write code, but only by installing a simple program capable of performing the task.

Although WordPress by default provides most of the functions that a news site might need, there is a group of plugins whose installation will help in designing the news site, adding new functions to it, improving its performance, and making it easier for its articles to appear in search results, so this step is important. To create a successful news website.

The most prominent plugins that news sites may need include the following:

Jetpack : Helps you secure your news site and protect contact forms from spam.
Yoast SEO : Allows you to improve the SEO of articles, which helps you rank at the top of search results.
WP Rocket : You can improve the performance of your site by relying on cache.
Optimole : Optimizes images and compresses their size. This is especially useful for news sites because they usually include a large number of images.
Monsterinsights : Provides you with the ability to know traffic information from within the WordPress control panel, based on Google Analytics .

The following plugins can also be useful to you in some cases if you want to improve your news site:

News & Blog Designer Pack : It helps in designing the news website by providing the ability to display posts in different ways, in addition to many other advantages.
WP Latest Posts : Provides you with the ability to create the latest news page and its sections in a modern and professional way in the form of beautiful, responsive sliders.
Contact Form 7 : Allows you to create and customize a contact form in order to enable visitors to send you messages and inquiries, thus helping you improve your news site.
OneSignal : You can send instant notifications to visitors who do not mind this, and this enables you to greatly increase the number of visits to your site.
Sassy Social Share : It makes it easy for visitors to share the news you publish on a large number of social media platforms.

If you need a specific function on your site, you can search online for an add-on that provides the ability to perform the task, then you can download the add-on from the add-ons section on the official WordPress website, where there are thousands of free WordPress add-ons that can be downloaded completely safely.

Step 7: Learn how to write and publish news

After implementing all the steps of creating and designing a news website, as we mentioned previously, you can start writing news and publishing it directly, and over time, in conjunction with the growth of your site, you can continue to improve and build it, including building classifications and tags , changing its design to become better and more suitable for visitors’ preferences, and so on.

But before you start writing and publishing news, you must learn how to deal with the component editor, which is the basic tool that enables you to write and publish in WordPress. Therefore, we have written a comprehensive article entitled ( Explanation of the Gutenburg component editor for adding articles and pages ) that explains how to use it, and we strongly encourage you to read it. on her.

Step 8: Promote the site and get visits

After creating and designing the news website and starting to publish news on it, comes the stage of promoting it to obtain visits to invest in achieving the goal of creating the website. Although this task seems difficult, it is actually easy to achieve if you follow the right practices and methods to optimize the site and direct visitors to it.

In many articles, we have highlighted how to obtain and increase website traffic. You can read these articles and follow the tips we have provided in them. The most prominent articles that will benefit you in obtaining visits to your news websites include what we will present in the following list:

Step 9: Monetize visits to profit from the news site

There is always a reason to create and design a news website, and many times the reason is to make money by monetizing website traffic. After launching your news website and the traffic rate increases to a sufficient extent, you will be able to invest these visits to profit in one of the ways that allow profit from websites, the most important of which are:

Advertisements , where some money can be made by placing ads from advertising networks such as Google AdSense on the pages of your site.
Affiliate marketing , which means providing customers to companies through your site and receiving a percentage of the profits made by those companies.
Selling products , as you can attach an online store to your news website, and sell digital or physical products related to the topic of the site.

There are also many other ways in which you can make a profit by relying on the news site, and you can view them by reviewing the article ( Profit from the Internet using 19 proven methods from your own website ), which is a comprehensive guide on this topic.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that you may need to perform many actions while managing your news website. If it is difficult for you to implement one of them and you need explanations, you can use the search box on our website to access a detailed article that will help you carry out the required action.

With this, dear readers, we have finished explaining in detail how to create and design a news website, and we would like to point out in conclusion that it is necessary to seize opportunities when there are important events that belong to the site’s specialty by writing about them in high quality, as this will increase the number of visits and contribute to Achieving goals and maintaining the progress and success of the news site on a permanent basis.