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Small Businesses Must Build Their Website on WordPress

WordPress is the key is to have access to your own Content Management
System. But, I am getting ahead of myself.

You are a small business and need a web presence? You have little if no
software skills? I guess that describes about 99% of us, except those whose
business is software!

First, know why you are going on the web in the first place. To be found and
to be talked about. Both of these are going to need content; lots of it. A
website that does not publish content frequently is dead - search engines
give up on it, your repeat visitors come back once and see the same old
stuff they saw a week back and are gone; never to return.

So, the investment in website development for your company is more than just
a one time investment; it is a continuous process. You need to keep changing
the text and the pictures to keep the search engines and visitors
interested.

Do get your website professionally done. In fact, even if you are a software
company, consider this. Web-design may not be your core competence area.
Give it to a professional to do. Drive the strategy and branding, by all
means but leave the execution to the experts.

But, and this is important, choose the development platform yourself.
Remember, the content has to be kept updated? If your vendor did the
development using technology that you did not understand, then every time
you change anything on any of the pages of the website, you will need to go
back to the vendor to change it. And, that will mean a recurring cost.

When we re-did our website, we looked for a vendor with specific skills on
building using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System).

What does that mean?

It basically means that I have a powerful editor, easy to use at my command
which I can use anytime to nip, tuck and even chop and change my website-
long after my vendor is gone.

Change the navigation of this link? Sure, 30 seconds. Re-write the copy of
the home page? 30 minutes to write and 30 seconds to publish. Change the
image on the homepage? 3 minutes. Create a new promotions page and add it to
the site? 30 minutes.

Bonus: Have a SEO friendly site with a structured sitemap the search-engines
love, thousands of plug-ins for adding functionalities like search,
ecommerce, social sharing and so on.

How can you NOT be on WordPress?

Okay, you can be on Joomla or Drupal or other open source CMS platforms too.
We used WordPress and we know it worked great for us.

But, isn't WordPress a blogging platform? I don't want my site to look like
a blog.

All I can say is that it won't. Ours does not! Ours is simple, but there are
some really complex sites out there developed on WordPress or other such
open source content management systems.

Go ahead, give it a shot!

One more thing, if you want to know how to play with the WordPress backend
and you know nothing about software, fear not. Consider starting your blog
first on wordpress dot com. Takes very little time to get the hang of it.
Once you know it, be aware that your website's CMS will work EXACTLY the
same way.

my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can
be done today."

Regards Gerald Crawford

Stellenbosch South Africa
Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile)
E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

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