Building a great Portfolio or, more generally, a sleek grid layout site with smooth ajax navigation is  simple and fun with SuperThemes.  Even if you are a newbie when it comes to  building websites, and you don’t have a clue in  where to start, you can easily do it following simple steps

In this guide, we’ll quickly show you how to get started.

Step 1: Choose the right web hosting for your needs

Web hosting is often seen as complicated but starting with the right moves will make things trivial even for a newbie.

The basic hosting requirements to smoothly run WordPress with one of the SuperThemes themes are just PHP and MySQL running on a Linux server; if you don’t have a preferred choice, we can definitely give you some  recommendations based on our personal experience.

For a new site, if you don’t plan to be flooded with hundreds of visitors every day, This Web Host has some great deal. They allow you to buy a domain name of your choice too. For 29 $ a year, it seems like a great value.

If you are a rockstar (and we know you are!) and you  have very high volume of traffic on your site, or want to have extremely high performance, Medialayer is our hosting recommendation. Their offer is flexible and support is very good. Pricing is obviously a bit higher.

If you’re a newbie, one more suggestion: if you don’t want to deal with an FTP at all, or don’t even know what FTP is, make sure the WordPress  auto-install script is present in the package you are willing to buy (that’s the case for our recommendations).

Step 2: Installing WordPress with the automated installer

There’s no real reason to lose more than a couple of minutes doing this: most web hosts have a feature allowing easy, step-by-step instant installation of WordPress. This feature comes under the name of Softaculous (for ThisWebHost) or Installatron (on Medialayer), or Fantastico on other hosting panels.

Step 3: Choosing and buying your Theme

Browse our Themes and choose one of our plans, accordingly to your needs and budget.

Our themes are sold via a yearly subscription that  is risk-free as you can cancel anytime, keeping your downloaded themes.

Purchasing is fast and easy, you can use PayPal or your credit card.

After completing your purchase, you will receive an email with your access credentials.

Log-into your SuperThemes account, you will access your  dashboard:

To download   your products (and future updates)  just go to  the versioning board (the first green button!)

Step 4: Installing the theme

You absolutely don’t need to use FTP: it’s much faster to upload directly from the WordPress administration panel.

You will need to:

• Install the Evolutive2 Theme, the required main engine of LTE
• If you want to use another of our Themes, install it AFTER installing Evolutive2

How to install a theme:

• Go to Appearance > Themes
• Proceed to Install Themes > Upload

Choose the theme .zip file and activate the theme.

The next part, setting permalinks, may be skipped with the latest release of the theme, given that you are setting up a new site or a site with less than 5 posts+pages.

So go safely  to step five, if setting up a new, empty site.

Setting permalinks - this is required for the ajax navigation to work, just:

• go to Settings > Permalinks
• Set the permalink custom structure to:   /%post_id%/%postname%/

Step 5: Activating the theme and choosing your first layout

Now visit your site’s homepage and…

Click the Activate button – and you will enter the world of the Presets.

Choose a preset, and click the INSTALL THIS PRESET  button.

The preset will be instantly loaded to your site and added to the Preset Manager:

Click the red link and have a look.  The Preset Manager  will be very handy once you want to load more presets in the future.

In the following video you can view the whole procedure:

Step 6: Uploading your content

Publishing your own content is fast and easy.

If you are reading the post ’til here you’re awesome and you will no doubt have some great content – like stunning images – create a post and add one or more images, and your text if any.

In the following video you can see a step-by-step procedure for publishing two posts. It’s deadly easy.

We recommend you just paying attention to a small detail: when uploading an image, don’t forget to set a featured image for your newly created post.

Why the featured image?
The featured image is the one that will show up in the site’s home page (and in the category pages), before clicking (“expanding”) the post.

Step 7: Enjoy your site…and learn how to customize the layout!

Call your friends, share it on Facebook….and let them enjoy your newly created portfolio site.

The fun is just begun: learn how to customize your design with our LTE technology!

Layout is important, Content is king. Keep your site updated!

Keeping your site updated it’s so easy now: you have no excuses

You can make your life even easier. Learn how  to publish content from your mobile phone, or  how to enable live content editing with our free Live Content Editing plugin.

Play!

Image CC http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesrbowe/4131812672/