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You have known for a while that you need to revamp your firm’s website. Maybe it is still sporting ©2006 in the footer, or maybe nobody remembers how to get to the files to update the content, or maybe you just think it’s ugly. All of those are pretty good reasons to launch a new website. A few (better) reasons you might want to launch a new site are:
- to get found
- to make it easier to publish new content
- to build an online hub for your company, rather than just a placeholder with a logo
If you or someone you work with is faced with rolling out a new website, it can be daunting – but it doesn’t have to be. I will share a little secret with you, which will put you on a path to website bliss: Wordpress. Wordpress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog – it is both free and priceless at the same time.
If you can decide to use Wordpress as your website platform of choice, it will cross out many questions you have about rolling out a new site. Questions like:
- “Is my new site going to cost a fortune?”
- “Should I just try to build it myself with GoDaddy or webhosting tools?”
- “I think my brother makes websites, maybe he can do it.”
All of these questions go away if you decide to use Wordpress. Here are a few compelling reasons to build your site on Wordpress:
- Large community for tips and support
- Open Source
- Platform is free
- CMS and Blog platform, all-in-one
- SEO friendly
- Plugins, plugins, and more plugins
- Themes – free and premium
Now, I am gearing this a little more towards the DIY crowd – perhaps you don’t have the budget to hire out a developer for your site, or you have someone in-house that wants to learn and dedicate some time to it. So, once it’s agreed upon that you will use WP to build your site, all you have to decide is what flavor you will use. There are two basic flavors of Wordpress – Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org, with some options within them.
Wordpress.com
This version is hosted on the WP servers, and they manage/control every aspect of the site. This would most likely be the most cost-efficient approach, but it is a bit less flexible. There are themes to choose from, but no ability to add your own plugins. There are “upgrades” that can be purchased to unlock the site a little bit. I would say that if you go this route, it is imperative that you buy the “custom domain” upgrade, which will allow you to get rid of the “.wordpress.com” extention on your account and let’s you use your company domain for the website. There is also a CSS upgrade, which basically just lets you customize the look and feel of your theme a little more – font, color, sizing, etc.
Wordpress.org
This version of WP is also free, but you are responsible for finding a place to let it run. This could be on an in-house server, or with a web-hosting company with tools to help install it.
Self-hosted
This approach can be a little cheaper up front, but the risk might be higher because you will be completely responsible for making sure the server your site is running on stays healthy and online. Backups would be critical, if not even more-so. Installing Wordpress, especially on a Windows web server, could be a little tricky because it will require PHP and MySQL. If you are up for the task though, by all means give it a shot – at least to do some testing.
Web-hosted
There are all sorts of web hosts out there- GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Media Temple- and many of them support Wordpress – including control panel tools that will install and help setup a new WP site with just a few clicks. This approach will give you 100% control over your site – themes, plugins, code, etc.
One other service I recently found to host a WP site is called WPEngine. The price tag is a little bit higher than a basic web host, but for $50 a month, the service will offer premium support, automatic security upgrades, recommended plug-in curation and some original software. They also mention that they allow WP to scale during traffic spikes, and allow for “staging” which would help with applying a new plugin or making changes to the site design. This group really knows Wordpress, that is for sure.
Now that you have all the facts on Wordpress and why you should build your site on it, you just need to decide when to get started. Then you could go look for a theme and some plugins. I have some recommendations, but I’ll save those for next time. If you can’t wait, email me at mlynton at xcentric.com.