The rest of this guild should walk you through the basics of setting up your hosting package, customizing Wordpress, and adding content. But before you start this is a good time to prepare a few things.
First, have a plan. It's not uncommon to take out a sheet of paper and draw out what you want your website to look like. What should be in the header? What goes in the body? Where should your images go? What features should it have? Where will your social media icons go? What pages will your site have? Where does the logo go, or the menu?
If you're not sure, look at some other sites for inspiration. Astra Starter Sites are a good place to begin, and you can search the net for other ideas.
Next, what's your call-to-action? Your call-to-action is what you want a visitor to do, or know about when they visit your site. Are you a business that wants a customer to contact you? Are you a festival that wants people to purchase tickets or join your newsletter? Should your guests book an appointment, view your work, or read your blog? Now is the time to think about what you want to say to a visitor to your site, and what you want them to do. That's your call-to-action, and it's what your site will be built on.
Start thinking about what you want your site to be, and how you want it to look. Gather lots of images and text. Write some copy for your site. What do you do? What are you great at? What are your services, products, skills, creations? Your website is a great place to tell your story and be bold. Start writing down a few declarative statements, 50-100 words, that describe who you are and what you do.
If you're going to have a blog, gather your blog entries or write a few. It's hard to build a blog without some content to get started, so having a few entries at hand will make the job easier.
If you're going to include some content from other sources, like videos from YouTube or Vimeo, a booking application from a third-party, content you've built with another service, start getting those accounts in order and look for instructions on their site for embedding on a site of your own.
Social media accounts are a great way to keep in touch with your customers and share your work. If you have or plan to start accounts with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc, create or identify your accounts now. You don't want to establish your brand and later find out someone else already has your Twitter handle.
If you have a logo make sure you have a high-quality image, ideally in multiple formats, so it can be placed in different areas of your site. If you don't have a logo, there are services that will help you develop one, or you can have a freelance designer build one for you.
Freelance designers - https://www.designcrowd.ca/
Logo maker - https://brandmark.io/