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
Agreed 110%! As far as taking WordPress to the complete site level, combine it with Revolution (http://www.revolutiontheme.com/) for a low fee of ~ $80, and you’ve got a sure fire winner!
Well put, Julian. Clear and concise.
I use WordPress.com for my blog (just click on my name if you want to see how a completed site lokks) … it’s free’n'easy,
BUT: no ads are allowed and a lot of features that appear to be in the downloadable version of WordPress are missing.
I agree, the more I learn WordPress and the more free templates I see the less I see a need for developing a website from scratch.
For many small businesses there really is no need to put up anything else.
Doug
Hey, thanks very much to all for leaving your comments! I really enjoyed hearing from all of you. Have a good one.
- Julian, editor
WordPress provides a cheaper alternative then paying an expensive web developer – and most small businesses don't have a lot of cash.
Self-hosted WordPress is the ideal platform for anyone to create and maintain a website. Depending upon the theme used, and this issue can have a great deal of impact, WordPress takes you a long way down the path you need to be on for SEO. It actually does a multitude of SEO tasks that are overlooked with other platforms. The ease involved with adding content to a WordPress site and keeping all the pages in complete sync makes using WordPress a classic "no-brainer"
I love wordpress and use it for all my business websites. I'm really surprised how many of my colleagues don't use it yet, probably because they don't truly understand the benefits versus the other options.
I agree that WordPress should be an option that every business owner should seriously consider when building or redesigning their website.
As easy as WordPress.com is, I think that for the sake of more control and customization, business owners should consider finding a suitable host and run the free WordPress install from WordPress.org. Many of the bigger hosts now have automated WordPress installs that take less than 5 minutes to install.
I've written a 50+ page ebook guide to help business owners build and maintain a WordPress site called The Small Business Guide to Building & Managing a Website: The Power of WordPress
Thanks for a great post.