A website of your own — live in a minute

Why a site of your own

A social page gets seen fast, but it looks like every other page, and when the platform changes its rules the people who used to see your posts go with them. With a site of your own, customers find you on Google, the content is yours, and it looks however you want.

WordPress is a free, open-source way to build a website, and a lot of the web runs on it. There is a theme and a plugin for nearly everything: a company site, a blog, a booking page.

What the site comes with

Usually the first page waits on renting hosting, setting up a database, installing WordPress and finding a way to make its emails arrive. On Erawan that is done when you press the button.

• Thai, on Thai time, with a short “welcome” home page waiting for you to change.
• Email that arrives, from password resets to contact-form messages.
• A database of the site's own, shared with no other site and backed up every hour.
• The site's own https address, working as soon as the site is up.

1. Create the site, and set your email and password

Press this link to create your WordPress site. If you have no Erawan account yet, you are taken to sign up first.

It then takes you to the site's Secrets and waits for two values. You choose both: they are the email and password for the admin. Press Set value and fill them in one at a time.

• The site owner's email. Use your real email. It is your sign-in name, and the site sends its notices to it.
• The password for your site's admin. Make a new one here, long and used nowhere else. A password manager can generate it.

Once both are in, the rest happens by itself: it installs WordPress in Thai and creates the administrator from the email and password you set. Setting them first means the admin is yours from the first minute. There is no moment when someone else could open it and make themselves the owner.

2. The site and its admin

Your site has two addresses, both starting with the app name you chose when you pressed deploy.

• The site, https://yoursite.erawan.app. What visitors read. For now it shows the short welcome page we put there.
• The admin, https://yoursite.erawan.app/wp-admin/. You write pages and posts, change the theme and add plugins here, signing in with the email and password from step 1.

Both links are on your app's page in the console too: Open site goes to the site and Open admin to the admin.

In the admin, start by renaming the site in Settings → General, because it is still called “เว็บของฉัน” (“My site”). Then edit the welcome page under Pages. The whole look, from header and footer to colours, is in Appearance → Editor, and so are the theme's English footer links (Blog, About, FAQs). The site starts in Thai. To run it in English, change Settings → General → Site Language.

What it costs, and what is yours

One site fits the Hobby plan, ฿99 a month during the launch, a flat price that does not rise with visitors. It includes 500 emails a month, each recipient counting as one. See every plan

All the content is in your site's own database, backed up every hour, and uploaded pictures are on the site's disk. The site is the same WordPress the rest of the web runs, unmodified, so the day you want to move, you export it from Tools → Export as you would anywhere.

Going further

• Your own domain. Add it on the app's Domain name tab, on Hobby and above. The .erawan.app address keeps working. Setting up DNS is in Use your own domain.
• Selling as well. The WooCommerce template is WordPress with a shop built in, in Thai and in baht from the start.