The benefits of building your website using Wordpress are enormous:
- You get blog functionality, thereby enabling you to frequently update your site (and thereby improving your site rankings)
- Wordpress has a wide user community that develops and maintains many free resources you can use on your Wordpress site:
- Widgets extend your website’s functionality. Use them to install a form for newsletter sign-ups, set up a revenue stream by publishing Google ad-words, placing badges to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, etc.
- Themes set the look and feel of your site. There are tons of free themes, and many ones you can buy for a nominal cost.
- If you get stuck, the Wordpress support forum is free and members are very helpful to all skill levels.
- You can easily edit your site’s content yourself.
Most website domain hosting providers offer free installation of Wordpress on your site. This is usually performed through the site’s control panel. Once Wordpress is installed, you can easily change the theme by selecting one from the Wordpress library and previewing it first before you hit the “install” button. Then, just add pages (the tabs at the top add automatically in many themes) and you’re off and running.
I used Wordpress for this blog with the free Hybrid theme. For a free theme, Hybrid is pretty flexible, and has few coding errors. And, the support provided through the user forum is first-class and worth every penny of the $25 annual fee.
Recently, I’ve switched to the paid theme “Thesis” for several sites I am building for clients. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible, and allows for a great presentation along with easy updates and amendments. Check out this site I did for Bikram Yoga Folsom – all done with Wordpress and the Thesis theme.
You don’t need to be a programming stud muffin to build yourself a premier website using Wordpress, though having a bit (and I do mean just a bit) of understanding of html and CSS does help.
Don’t feel like climbing the steep learning curve? I’d be happy to do the work for you at a cost probably much less than a programmer would charge (depending on the functionality you require.) Once your site is up, I’ll teach you how to change the content of the pages and post to your blog so you can keep your website fresh and current all by yourself!
{ 1 comment }
I use wordpress myself and it really is very cool. I’ve seen so many companies today using WP for their site construction because it does help with Search engine optimization and it’s so easy to update once you get it in gear.
Thanks for the info
BTW: Carol, I LOVE your use of “programming stud muffin” – great moniker for a power coder!
Comments on this entry are closed.