In a week I will launch my new website. Ever since I decided to switch websites (about a year ago) other Small Business owners have asked me: Sarah, I need a new website. What do you recommend ? First I thought I wasn’t qualified to answer, since I’m definitely not a web designer, but now, after building my own site (with some precious help), I will answer the following: if you want an easy to manage, cost effective, social media share-able website, I recommend you get a Wordpress.org site for your small business.
Let me share some reasons that brought me to this conclusion:
- WordPress is free
- WordPress is very commonly used. This means that you will find:
- more design templates (Themes) – both free and paid– available for WordPress than for other systems
- more extensions (called Plugins) which allow you to do almost anything (for example make posts share-able on Social Media, create contact forms, manage posts in multiple languages etc. etc. )
- more information, help files and how-to videos
- WordPress is easy to use, even for non-technical users. This is probably the main reason why I recommend you get a Wordpress site. Because as a small business owner you might not want to pay your webmaster every time you have to update a page. Wordpress’ interface is simple and easy to use and you can update your site without any HTML knowledge.
- WordPress is a very powerful Content Management System (CMS).
- Parent and Child Pages and Posts
- Categories and Page Templates
- Multiple Users and different User levels (Roles)
- Advanced Menu editing system
- WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Visual and HTML Editors
- Plugins and Themes (templates)
- XML import and export
- multilingual website management through plugins
- Wordpress is Search Engine Optimization friendly. As a small business I am sure you are aware that your website is only valuable, if it gets enough traffic. In order to get traffic, it has to show up in search engines. “All in one SEO” is a great plugin for Wordpress which will help you optimize your website for your keywords and increase your chances to be found on Google and other engines.
- Google loves Wordpress. Since Wordpress sites are so easy to optimize, they are ranked highly on Google search results.
- Wordpress is evolving. Wordpress doesn’t stand still (compared to other CMS I’ve seen). It keeps evolving, programmers keep creating new features to keep up with trends in internet technology.
What is your opinion? Love it or hate it? Does your site run on Wordpress ? Please share in the comments below. Finally, if you would like to discuss a site project, contact me today, I’d be happy to answer your questions.
