If you own a small to medium-size business and want a website that’s easy to manage and to update, I highly recommend building your site using WordPress. WordPress began as a blogging tool, but it has evolved into a very powerful CMS (content management system) that makes it easy to maintain a website that doesn’t look like a blog at all.

As mentioned in my previous column, a CMS is a good choice for many business websites because it’s designed to simplify content changes without the need for expensive software or HTML expertise.

WordPress is not the only popular CMS — alternatives such as Joomla and Drupal are widely developed, with thousands of fans — but for someone inexperienced with writing code or developing websites, WordPress is easier to learn and to use.

3 reasons to use WordPress

Easy (relatively) to install and support.

WordPress is free and can be installed quickly at the many hosting companies that support it. It’s not installed on your Web designer’s computer — it’s installed on the servers at your Web host. This means you can make updates from any computer connected to the Internet.

To be clear, there’s a distinction between WordPress.com and Word

Press.org. When you go through WordPress.com, the software is hosted and managed for you, so it’s easier to set up your site, but you can’t run a custom theme or upload plug-ins (small software programs that extend capabilities). It’s much less flexible. Word

Press.com is used primarily by private bloggers.

WordPress.org gives you much more control over the look and functionality of your site, so it’s better for most businesses.

However, you need a good Web host, and it requires more technical knowledge to set up. This is the version used by Web designers who build in WordPress.

Because it’s “open source,” any developers can customize the code and tweak it to their heart’s content. Thousands of free and premium themes and plug-ins are available. Because so many website designers use and customize WordPress, it’s not difficult to find experts and support forums online if you need help.

Easy (relatively) to make site updates without hiring a designer.

If you’ve done any text editing at all (for example, if you use Word), you’ll probably find it easy to create new pages, edit existing pages, add photos or videos, and so on in WordPress. The text editor is fairly intuitive, and there are hundreds of video tutorials online. No more waiting on a Web designer (or paying one) when you want to add a staff member to your “About” page or update a price on your “Services” page!

Better yet, you can make updates from anywhere. Client Phil Warnken of Warnken Properties (Denice.com) used Adobe Contribute to update the previous version of his site, but he now prefers WordPress. Says Warnken: “WordPress can be accessed from anywhere and does not have to be on the computer. ... That’s an advantage because I frequently travel internationally and often have to use a computer that is not mine.”

And because blogging capability is built into WordPress, you can easily add a blog to your site whenever you’d like. It’s more difficult to add a blog to a standard site than to add one to a site already built in WordPress.

WordPress is search-engine-friendly.

Matt Cutts (head of Web spam at Google, in charge of delivering the best, most spam-free search results) says WordPress is “made to do SEO well.” WordPress builds in a lot of search-engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. And what it does not do well — or well enough to get your site ranking high! — can be improved by adding SEO-related plug-ins.

The fact that WordPress makes blogging so easy also is part of its SEO appeal. The search engines love regularly updated content, and when you write and publish a blog post, Word

Press lets search-engine crawlers know your site has been updated.

In my opinion, the SEO proficiency of WordPress makes it worth considering for a Web editor, regardless of whether any of its other advantages are important to you.

WordPress is my favorite site design tool and has become a mainstay of my business. I like it because it’s flexible, adaptable and usually quick to set up. Although some custom coding is often required, it’s less than if I used traditional editing software. That means I can spend more time and effort writing content, tweaking the SEO and employing my expertise to make the site the best possible online marketing tool.

This arrangement — having an expert design and set up the website in WordPress, then transfer control to the client — seems to work well not only for me but for a number of Web design firms.

And it is much appreciated by business owners who’ve been frustrated with the hassle and expense of updating websites in the past.

Iran Engineering Reference Encyclopedia
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