My 2017 Recommendations for Website Building, for custom built websites are largely the same as the 2016 Recommendations. The additions would be about using semantic tags wherever possible and giving more focus on 2017 SEO.
However, this year I would like to give a shoutout to Practical Website Building. I have been doing this for more than a decade now. The vast majority of my active websites now run on the WordPress Content Management System (CMS). People should stop calling WordPress a “blogger’s platform” as it is very acceptable to build a Website using WordPress that indeed has no blog at all!
Server Specifications
The First Recommendation I always make is to get a Unix based Operating System like Ubuntu or FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a little harder to find, but Ubuntu is available almost everywhere.
What you want to avoid like the plague is anything Microsoft (Internet Information Services – IIS). As of this writing I do not buy server space from any company selling such low quality services. (Free Plug for Beginners… Pair).
Dedicated and Virtual Private Servers where you pick the Linux Operating System (you select Ubuntu) are available too. (Linode).
WordPress Theme and Plugins
First, keep your WordPress, theme and plugins up-to-date with the latest versions.
I will fill in this section with recommendation links as these develop.
Theme:
Pinnacle
Plugins:
Anti-spam
Simple Trackback Validation
Virtue / Pinnacle ToolKit
Yoast SEO
WordPress Techniques
Besides Great Content, organizing your content is important in order to get it listed on the Internet. This is not only Search Engine Optimization (SEO), however that is a great start! This section will link to posts to help you with the WordPress Techniques.
Title
Slug
Meta Description
Excerpt
Writing Your Post
See 2017 Writing Your WordPress Post for more detailed ideas on how to write a Great post that will be viewed by others and indexed by search engines…