How can you build your internet presence quickly and easily, keep costs low, and still get profession-looking results?
By taking this big task and breaking it into simple steps, we’ll show you how!
We’ll start off with making a website because it is the largest task. A website (or blog) will serve as the center-point for everything else you do, from e-mail campaigns to advertising and social media.
We’d love to build the basics of your site for you – at a great price! – but if you’re willing to take it ‘one step at a time’ you can get it done, and done well!
Our web building solution-of-choice is WordPress… I have reviewed several other systems and a few are worth consideration. (You might take a look at Jimdo, Weebly, Webstarts, Yola and Google Sites or – if you want something wildly flashy, Wix. We’ve got YouTube reviews for some of these and a comparison chart.)
===> If you have about $30 per month and want the simplest system possible, take a look at speaklight.com. (Our services to help you get set up with a great looking site apply to building sites there, too.)
My biggest reason for being such a WordPress fan is that for just a couple of bucks a month you choose a hosting company – and no single vendor is ever in charge of your destiny online again. (You can’t get ‘stuck’ with any system – you can even move a WordPress setup to another platform pretty easily, usually. The software is public license – totally free! You can move to a new server any time you want.)
What is ‘Self Hosting’ and why do I need it?
| With free website builders, your website is ‘hosted’ (stored) on servers owned by the company giving you the ‘free’ site. It isn’t really free because they then control where your website is stored and what system you use to manage it!’Self Hosting’ means that you purchase hosting space to store your website from any company you want – and there are many. Doing this is important for three reasons: |
|
|
 |
1) Get controlHosting companies give you total control over your destiny. You choose the system and software you use, you choose how to run your e-mail accounts, and more. At any time, you can say bye bye to the hosting company and move your account elsewhere, with no change in how your website looks and works. | |
 |
2) Say goodbye to ‘upgrades’For the most part, you will never have to pay for an upgrade to get some ‘power feature’ again. Hosting accounts usually come with more power features than you will ever be able to use. In addition, with a system like WordPress (or anything similar) the community of users has built up literally thousands of extensions to address any special need or desire you might have – usually for free. | |
 |
3) Support when you need itTechnical support from free companies is usually worth about what you are paying for it. When you get a hosting account with a top-flight company you also get top-flight help, 24/7. Since hosting costs about $4 – 8 a month, the tech support alone is worth more than the price. |
 |
Introducing WordPress – What is it?WordPress is the #1 site software world-wide with more than 32,000,000 sites! (For some perspective, other vendors are considered ‘popular’ if they have a million users. Joomla is another highly popular system like WordPress, with about 22 million users.)Small business today often cannot afford the I.T. cost to build their brand, e-commerce and sites the ‘old way’. WordPress addresses this by empowering clients to easily update their own site without a steep learning curve. It becomes almost as easy to do the update, edit or addition as it is to have someone else do it! |
Positive Stuff About WordPress:Some other (mostly proprietary) systems and software are OK for building good sites inexpensively and quickly, but WP is by far the most popular. Some reasons:
|
WordPress Limitations:With so many advantages, WP nevertheless has some issues to be aware of:
|
How can you overcome these ‘limitations’ to get the big benefits?
I know these ‘problems’ are all minor. Once you begin to use a system and get comfortable with it you begin to build habits that erase these so-called problems – and that’s the big reason for this article! Let’s look at these issues more closely…
1) The main page content area of WP sites is ‘unstructured’, showing as one large block of content
|
|
Website software can change the layout on any page – if you buy the software. The best web-based website editors can sometimes (not always) change page layouts as you like fairly well, but a) you probably will end up having to pay for the service and b) once you start with that system, you can get stuck with it. But within the WordPress editor, multiple column or block layouts are possible using HTML. ‘Out of the box’, the built-in WordPress editor is not the best, but with a couple of essential free plugins it becomes quite good.Instead of choosing to use either a website editor on your computer or edit pages online, with WordPress you have the choice at all times. You can edit right in WordPress online, or copy-and-paste from nearly any software / word processor, or you can use easy computer-based software.In fact, authoring this page – with multiple layout areas – was easy as pie, using a ‘remote’ blogging program that lets me edit my website on my computer. Website software to author sites from your computer usually costs money or is proprietary, plus there probably aren’t also web-based methods built in (so you can’t work from anywhere).But such programs for WordPress are free, well-tested and easy–and they work with many kinds of blog systems (not just WordPress.)You essentially get the best of both worlds: the ability to edit via the internet from any online computer as well as editing on your computer. Editing on your computer even allows you to schedule when updates will be published, so you can appear to be working – while you are at the beach! |
. . |
2) Some site messages such as ‘Comments are off’ show up when you don’t want them
| WordPress was originally built to run blogs – commentary-powered sites with a lot of public input. To make websites without those features is easy – just don’t use ‘em. (Build ‘pages’ instead.). But if you want the power of using posts, then the needed ‘code tweaks’ (to turn off some of the data displays for blogs you won’t need) are included even in our inexpensive website services.But if you want to look a little deeper and investigate details like these, you’ll find there are very few edits like this you need to make. Some new themes no longer even have this issue, for instance, as they have controls to turn the display off. |
3) Fine tuning or changing the basic layout is tough, as WP sites are built on complex
code using CSS and database programming techniques
| The ease of set-up and the power WP provides has this one achilles heel, but trust me when I say it is not a big issue.End users usually cannot change page layouts or built-in theme features much, making fine adjustments hard. The trade-off benefit is that to get the power of WP from other website software requires a lot of time, work and upgrade cost, which are problems WP doesn’t have.
So – It is a trade-off, but this lack of fine layout control is rapidly becoming less of an issue as many new themes are coming out with layout choices built in. There are also plugins that allow for multiple column content, for instance. If you want a page to have more of a ‘news magazine’ style, using such a plugin could give you that power easily – but only if you know to look for it. Step one is choosing a template. There are so many to choose from, you are likely to get something you like very quickly, already made and most often available free! (Some nicer ones cost money, of course.) If you want to further personalize the look of your WP-based site, the easiest way is to produce your own banner image – something you’d prefer to do with any site building approach anyway. In addition, some themes have multiple control panels that allow you to edit color schemes, etc. Some themes (even some free ones) come with multiple page templates. |
4) Users need to learn what a blog is in order to use ‘post’, ‘category’ and search features, etc
| This issue is very easy to address… You’ll have to learn some kind of system no matter what, but WordPress (and Joomla) are widely thought to be some of the easiest systems to work with around.How much a user has to learn and how hard it is to get used to your system is the issue. We’ve gotten many ‘computer illiterate’ users up and going in one afternoon, so it isn’t hard!
Remember: You don’t have to use every feature to start with – or ever, if you don’t want to – as long as you learn to use some very basic things, such as editing your content, adding an image, adding a page, etc. All of these tasks are extremely simple in the WordPress ‘Dashboard.’ The WordPress editing window looks like a word processor with mostly intuitive controls. Features that are new to you often don’t even have to be used, for instance, unless and until you want them. You can get started with almost no learning and grow from there by using common-sense word processor and browser functions you already know. When you are ready, WordPress will certainly give you all the room you need to grow! |
5) So many plugins can be confusing…
| Plugins come in every possible flavor and number in the thousands, touching on every task you could imagine from e-commerce to automated social media networking. Which are best? There is one simple and systematic way to tell; do some (re)searching.Search on Google for ’2011 wordpress plugin’ plus the terms you’re looking for and you will get quite a response, most of which should be recent enough to matter. You will instantly have suggestions and reviews, many written by experts.
Then, from your plugin control page in the dashboard, use the “Add New” search function to find the named plugins you want to look into further. These ‘within WordPress’ search results will tell you how many people have installed it and the plugin will also be dated and rated. Finding a plugin used by thousands of people is a good endorsement, as is a top-flight rating from users. The system will even tell you if the plugin is tested with your version of WordPress and how long ago it was updated, as well as giving you the link to the developer’s website. Then – try it out, live! If it does what you like nicely right before your eyes, you’re good to go. Since they are usually free, you can even compare several one right after the other and uninstall the ones you like less. Take one common sense step before you try new plugins, though, and back up your site. There are several plugins for this simple task and most all of them are great. |
Now you know some of the essentials!
 |
WordPress is by no means perfect. Not everyone can cope with it ‘behind the scenes’.But the basic benefits are so strong and the system is so popular that such issues mostly ‘go away’. The big secret to rapid success with WordPress is to try not to change it!
Simply work with the system. Ideally, you’ll control your web-building experience (keeping it pleasant) by picking the right features, plugins, theme and basic layout the first time, but even if you ‘mess up’ and want to change themes, it is easy as pie. There are plenty of minefields waiting to tackle you no matter what system you choose. At least with WordPress you’ll know you have avoided a LOT of problems from the very start! And when you’ve grown big enough to need some hired help, you can be sure we’ll be there! See you next time!
|
