Almost every business needs a website. Having a website gives you a place to put information your prospects need to make their first sale and your previous customers need to close their second. If you understand the fundamentals of search engine optimisation, Google will drive potential customers to your website where they can learn enough about your products and services to buy them. Content posted on your website can reduce the cost of supporting your customers, providing answers to their most frequently asked questions and solutions to their most frequently encountered problems.
Not all websites are created equal. A site that you and your employees can maintain without much outside support is critical because having to pay people to make changes to it quickly becomes costly.
WordPress is a content management tool that makes updates just about as easy as sending email. There are a wide variety of plug-ins that you can use to make WordPress to clever things like accept orders or send updates for site changes.
All websites should be attached to a relevant domain name. Follow these directions to purchase a domain name at GoDaddy.com and set up a WordPress website hosted on their servers for under £10 a month:
- Go to http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting.aspx
- Choose a hosting package in line with your budget.
- Create a Domain name and add it to your order.
- Provide payment information.
- In about an hour, you will receive instructions on how to access your domain. You will usually be told to log in at www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. Once logged in you will see tools that allow you to add, delete and edit pages.
- You can find books that provide step-by-step instructions on how to use WordPress at Amazon.
By following these instructions you can bring your commercial website online in a matter of hours. If you prefer, you can hire someone to create and maintain your website for you. Since WordPress is one of most commonly used content management systems currently available, there are many developers out there who know how to create, launch and customise it.
David Brewerton
19 March 2010
1:28 pm
Great post Doug. As a career IT professional, you’d expect me to fear the rise of WordPress, Joomla and other potentially DIY website tools but I actually think they are a great enabler, particularly for startup small businesses.
I have posted my thoughts on the Website Freedom blog http://tinyurl.com/yhqs6gd I advocate letting a web designer pull your small business site together simply because a startup business can’t afford to get bogged down in techsoup. But frankly, for a web designer, a WordPress site is going to be far faster to build and very affordable for most small startup businesses.
Signe Cleavenger
22 March 2010
1:08 am
Geez, everytime I see blogs this good I just want mine to be there already!
Great work.
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4:13 pm
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