This post corresponds to podcast Episode 7: Building Your Website (and Blog) on WordPress with Ben Cope of WordPress University which is included in the Free Marketing Made Easy Core Program, accompanied by workbook and video tutorials that show you how to do this on your own.
Our last post discussed the way you can create an affordable and professional brand identity. Now that you have the right look, it’s time to focus on building your website. After all, this will become the centerpiece of your online marketing strategy.
Is your website limiting your company’s ability to grow? Your answer should be ‘yes’ if:
- You have to pay a programmer every time you want to make a change.
- You can’t even bear the thought of trying to add audio and/or video to it.
- It doesn’t include automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools.
- Your prospects can only engage with you through email or the telephone.
If any of these apply, you should consider moving to WordPress.
One of the easiest and most cost-effective self-publishing platforms, WordPress started out as a web-based blogging platform. Since bloggers didn’t have to download or launch any software they could update their blog any time from anywhere. As blogs began to expand and include different forms of media (video, audio, etc), the WordPress platform grew into a full Content Management System (CMS) that you can now use to run your blog and the rest of your site. It’s seamless.
Inexpensive, flexible, customizable and SEO optimized!
WordPress is inexpensive to set up: a site will often cost you as little as a few hundred dollars. There are thousands of different templates to choose from and hundreds of plugins that easily extend the functionality of your site (contact forms, ecommerce, email sign up forms, etc) without requiring custom programming. Best of all perhaps, search engines love WordPress so your rankings are probably going to improve right away.
To set up a site on WordPress you would:
- Sign up for a wordpress.com account (free) if you want to play with the dashboard and get familiar with it.
- Do a Google search for “WordPress Theme.” You will find thousands of choices. Many are free, some are known as premium themes, which will run from $20 to $150.
- Find a host. Chances are that the host you are currently using can support WordPress.
- Decide whether you want to learn how to do the installation and customize the site yourself, or hire someone else. If you want help just contact our contributor Ben Cope at Epic Web Strategies.
Note: any theme can be customized so don’t worry if you don’t like the pictures or colors that come with your theme. Those are easy changes to make. Questions? Let us know!
Now you are ready to build a great site and you’ll want to know how to optimize it for the Search Engines, in order to get found by relevant prospects. So read on to learn about SEO basics.
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