Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL

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Episode 19 begins our Local Knowledge series on basic skills you’ll need in order to run your small business Website using WordPress.

Our lesson today kicks off with some background on using WordPress to power your small business website and concludes with a how-to video showing you how to log in to WordPress. This lesson assumes you have a working WordPress installation.

I’ll be continuing the WordPress for small business video tutorials by covering the most common things you’ll need to know to update your WordPress website on your own.

You can also follow the Pictorial under the video if you don’t want to watch the video intro and video lesson.

Step-by-Step Pictorial Below

Step 1: Click on picture to see full fize image

Step 2: Click picture to see full size image

Step 3: Click picture to see full size image

You may know WordPress as the very popular blogging tool that is now in use in over 50 languages and powers millions of blogs worldwide. What’s less known is the ability to use WordPress to power a regular small business website, even when there’s no blog involved.

Web marketers and website developers are increasingly using WordPress to power very large websites as well. Here are a few examples.

Customers around the world trust Network Solutions to manage more than 7 million domains, over 1.5 million e-mailboxes, and more than 350,000 Web sites.

Network Solutions Uses WordPress

Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978, Timberline Lodge is one of Oregon’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than two million visitors every year. Considered an architectural wonder, it’s still being used for its original intent—a magnificent ski lodge and mountain retreat for all to enjoy.

Timberline Lodge in Oregon uses WordPress for their website

Camacho Cigars have been described as “The Best Habano outside of Cuba” by many cigar experts. Our brands are made with the original Cuban Criollo and Authentic Corojo seed tobaccos grown by the Eiroa family in Honduras.

Camacho Cigars uses WordPress

Just from looking at these three examples of business websites built on WordPress you can see why we love to use it here at LOCALNa8ion.

Central in our strategy in using WordPress for small business websites is the flexibility inherent in WordPress itself. Think for a minute about the diversity of small businesses. There are almost as many types of companies, products and services as there are people – each one with their own unique needs.

The diverse requirements of small business requires your website publishing platform to meet three main criteria:

1. fully featured
2. easy to customize design and add content
3. easy to extend or add functionality (extensibility)

WordPress is part of the newer class of website platforms called Content Management Systems (CMS for short) and it scores near perfect marks in these categories, making it ideal to adapt for any use.

Did we mention that WordPress is free?

That’s because WordPress is Open Source software, which simply means anyone is free to use and alter the software for any purpose. Due to its open source nature WordPress has amassed a legion of users worldwide and that in turn has created a massive development community (over 10,000 worldwide) that write software (called plug-ins) that add functionality to WordPress.

An example of this flexibility would be a plug-in to make your WordPress website an e-commerce store. With the addition of just one WordPress plug-in (also free) your small business website can be completely transformed to sell your products over the web.

This saves tons of money on web development costs. A site that could have cost $5,000 to $10,000 U.S. only a few years ago can be made for as little as $1,000 $3,000 today.

The amount of WordPress users and developers insures an almost limitless supply of online tutorials, how-to guides, video lessons, books (like WordPress for Dummies) and other resources you can tap into to help build your website (like us here LOCALNa8ion). You never have to worry about buying some obsolete dinosaur that no one will be able to fix or change a few years down to road.

So what are some other examples of WordPress flexibility?

DESIGNM.AG, is an online community for web developers that recently posted 11 non-traditional uses of WordPress. If you read the post you’ll see people using WordPress to do everything from running an online membership directory to an email newsletter or online job board.

That’s part of the backstory on why you should sign up wth us to get your own WordPress installation today.

Julian Seery Gude, ed
Small Business Internet Marketing, Website Design, SEO | LOCALNa8ion
Where you are is where it’s at

I’ve talked a lot about WordPress but I haven’t explained why it’s better than all the typical offerings pitched to small companies (products from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, YellowPages.com, CitySearch, and others). Today I’ll do that in just 200 words. To accomplish my goal I’ll just hit the highlights and leave further explanation for later posts.

• It’s the tool the Pros use and there is good reason for that
• Offers you tremendous SEO out-of-the-box – this means FREE search engine marketing
• Easy to write and publish new content with no need for technical knowledge
• It can be a web site, a blog or both
• People like me all over the world are showing you how to use it – for free
• For less than $100 a year you can get an equivalent web site and blog for what you’d pay a designer or programmer $2-$5K for
• It’s really free, (called open source) only pay for web hosting
• Infinite design and feature customization
• Access to WordPress community of contributors numbering over 10,000 to assist with design, programming, training or consulting (size of community drives competitive pricing)
• Geek stuff under the hood helping you without you needing to know Geek