“I can’t update my website!”
“I’ve got to get my webmaster to do that, but it’s going to cost me…”
“Nooooo, I just hosed my website!”
If you talk to enough small business owners, or friends that want to have a website but don’t spend evenings and weekends tinkering around on the web, you’ll hear frustrations like this a lot.
And that’s from the ones who have figured out how to get a website up and running in the first place. There are many who are still trying to figure out where to start. But wait, there is hope!
WordPress to the Rescue
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools available. But what many people don’t know is that it is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that can be used for more than just blogging. With WordPress you can build a blog, a website, or both. This is the first article in a series where we’ll explore why WordPress is a good choice for small business websites, and how to install, configure and use it for your small business.
Web Content Management Systems
A content management system is a tool that helps you manage the creation and updates to web pages on your web site. In 1998 I was one of the early members of a Silicon Valley start-up called Interwoven. Interwoven provided Web Content Management solutions for large enterprises like Ford Motor, FedEx, Cisco and eventually thousands of others large and small companies. I learned a lot about web content management by meeting with hundreds of companies – ranging from the Fortune 100 to smaller companies - and digging into their web site architectures. The web was exploding at that time, and there was a tremendous demand for managing the ever expanding amount and types of content. During that period, our software sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Using WordPress as a Website
Fast forward to today, and now we have WordPress – an amazingly powerful content management system that is FREE. And it has a lot of power under the hood for a small or medium business looking for an easy way to manage their web site.
WordPress was designed as a platform for blogging, but you don’t have to use it as a blogging tool. With a few tweaks it can be used to run your website, with or without a “blog.” The fact that WordPress was designed as a blogging platform gives it some compelling advantages.
It is optimized for easily publishing and changing content. And getting good search engine rankings requires fresh, unique content. You need a system that does not get in your way when you want to update your website with a new article or newsletter.
So why is WordPress a good choice?
Top Five Reasons to Use WordPress for Your Small Business Website
- SEO – WordPress provides good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. There are a few tweaks you need to make, but there are many seo benefits that WordPress provides for free. In fact Google’s own Matt Cutts says WordPress is “made to do SEO well” in this video: Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners.
- Content – it is easy to update content on your website without knowing HTML. Do you hate the idea of having to learn to use a complex HTML editor tool like Dreamweaver? Do you have to “ask” your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your website? Well no longer – once WordPress is set up for you, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor.
- Extensions – There is a thriving ecosystem of developers creating themes and plug-ins – imagine free design themes, or the ability to extend your website with polls, contact forms, ratings or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer.
- Support – If you do have problems, or want to add very custom features, it is easy to find support and developers who can help you. There are literally thousands of WordPress developers out there. And there are so many people writing about WordPress that help is only a Google search away!
- One-click-installation – Quick installs are provided by many hosting providers, including Bluehost, 1and1 and GoDaddy.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing tips and tricks we’ve learned by using WordPress for a bunch of small business websites.
More WordPress Articles:
See my WordPress for Small Business Series websites for links to more WordPress articles on topics like: How to install WordPress, should I use WordPress.org or WordPress.com, How to make WordPress look like a Website, and more.
Need a website? The Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme is a complete small business website theme for WordPress. Click here to watch the video!
Are you using WordPress for your Website, or stuck with something that isn’t working for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
If you enjoyed this article, get email updates (it's free).
See my disclosure about advertising and affiliate links
{ 173 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
Hey guys, great info. I am a bootstrapping entrepreneur which means I’m doing my own site. I don’t have any coding skills, and I’ve used iweb to get by. My mind works visually, and I’ve been pleased with the way iweb lets me use images and manually move them around on a canvas. I need to move out of iweb and on to a more powerful platform, thus my interest in wordpress. I’ve discovered plenty of great wordpress sites that don’t look like blogs. I need lots of pages that don’t work like blogs. I can’t seem to find the resources I need to learn to make this work, any help from anyone would be awesome! Thanks guys!
I think like Brady above there are a lot of us aiming to achieve a similar objective. I suppose all one can try to do is accumulate as many techniques as possible to maximise the exposure (non-blackhat) of their blog.
Thanks for the read.
Cheers
Hi Don
What an inspirational article series. We read it and thought that we could apply this to our site. Studio Press supplied a great template with minimum changes required. Their Genesis framework made applying widgets and other configurations really easy.
We are finance and management consultants, not graphics artists and geeks, yet we came out the other end with a fabulous and professional looking site, complete with a response form. The power of WordPress as a content management system means that the system continues to deliver convenience well after the site went live.
We went with BlueHost because their simple script methods made loading WP almost trivial. Our previous host was a little nasty when they shut down our site immediately after we advised them that we wanted to repoint our domain name to BH. Fortunately the changeover propagated really quickly and the site was working within 5 minutes and all the email addresses were active within 20. Can’t complain!
Thanks once again. Your articles were pitched just right for us non-technical readers.
That’s great Tony – I’m really glad to hear you got your site up and running and my site helped. Thanks for taking the time to let me know!
Hey there. What do You think about WordPress based websites for mid or big business websites? I heard lot of developers, that it’s a bit painful to work on that stuff.
It depends on what you mean by big sites. For a large eCommerce site with hundreds or thousands of products? No, I don’t think WordPress is a great fit.
For sites with tons of traffic > 100,000 or even 1,000,000 visitors per month? There are lots of examples of WordPress sites handling that easily.
Even for sites with tons of content, WordPress works well. It just depends on the type of functionality you will need.
Hi Don
So what is the achilles heel for Wordpress, is it the dependency on PHP or MySQL or the lack of a e-commerce plug-in that can cater for hundreds or thousands of products?
Hi Tony,
Good question. I’d say these are probably NOT ideal for WordPress:
Good software, seems everyone is trying to acieve maximum internet exposure – unfortunatly there are a lot of firms that employ questionnable ways to get business.
Hello Tony,
We use wordpress for our website, is it possible to also have a blog and link it onto the website?
Ashley, the default landing page for WP is the standard blog page, but this can be changed in the control panel. I changed it to an “About Us” page. The blog is still accessible from the menu bar, or by a tag cloud, category list, or recent posts (all by means of widgets that can be set up within the chosen theme, to appear on every page or just the main page). Take a look at how I did it.
Hi Ashley
Yes, I suppose you could.
Instead of having a separate blog, we have brought it onto our site. We decided to use WordPress’ blog function as a replacement for our newsletter and use each blog entry as a new article about what’s going on in our industry or to share some management idea.
HTH
Thanks for all your tips, really appreciate your your handy website. My question:
Is it possible when using Wordpress as a website to set up a business email.
For example Lydia@ParisianBakery.com. I know about Wordpress contact form7, but what I’m looking for is email that says this is our business email.
Thanks for your help.
L.
Hi Lydia,
You can do that through your hosting provider, where your domain is registered. Just ask them – they will help you set up an email address that has your domain in it. Or you can use Google Apps to do this too.
Wordpress is much easier to use compared to other blog hosts. And it is SEO friendly with all the plugins and such. I created all of my sites with Wordpress.
I really liked your article; driving traffic and SEO is a difficult task that takes time. It’s easier to learn from those that already know the process rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. I appreciate when the experts undertake to help beginners succeed.
That, and the others on Wordpress are great for non-techs like me.
My current site has great Google ranking for all relevant search terms. The new designer wants to go from a custom-made CMS to wordpress. Will we immediately lose our Google ranking and start again and if so can I stop this happening?
Hi Nicholas,
Whenever you move to a new website, you’ll want to take an inventory of the URLs of your current site, and make sure that you redirect them to the appropriate URLs on your new site using 301 Permanent Redirects. This preserves any backlinks or authority that your pages have accumulated and transfers them to your new URLs.
I have been looking at signing up for WordPress for some time now and I found this is article very useful – thanks
Hi Folks
Just wanted to recommend BlueHost. I first heard about them through Don’s site. From the start their customer service has been great and with hosting at $5.95 per month its a great price. I followed Don’s instructions and voila I had WordPress up and going in no time. Transferring my domain across was really easy as well. In all my interactions with BH the operators have been helpful, friendly and forthcoming. Every interaction has resulted in a survey to give my feedback on the service and clearly this has had a positive result on their delivery.
Hello..Thanks for all your tips
Hi there,
I am creating my own website by hand coding the html and css in conjunction with Dreamweaver CS5. My question is, is it possible to link to Wordpress so that it works with my site as a message/contacts/comments page, so that when someone leaves a comment/message I receive an email and then I can respond to it?
Hi Ed,
While it is certainly possible, it would be a lot of work. If you want to get into WordPress, it’s really just HTML and CSS for the styling of your site. Your Dreamweaver skills will be valuable there, but it will take an investment to learn how WordPress themes work.
Hi Don
Fascinating article. Can you setup a Wordpress site on your existing domain while keeping the current published site intact until the final roll out?
Also if anyone can show any example of a Wordpress site that uses a blog for the home pages news and updates section that would be appreciated.
Hi Belinda,
Yes – just install the new WordPress in a sub-folder under the root directory. Then when you are ready to move it live, you can delete the site from the root directory and move the new site over like this: How to Move WordPress.
Don’t forget to back everything up first!
Hi Don, thanks for all of your feedback to everyone’s questions!
Perhaps I could ask, we are looking to deploy our new website BUT we are looking to include a web ‘application’ into the landing page of the site. The application is essentially a series of forms that will be completed by the user, and then submitted through a webservice call to our database system for processing before receiving and displaying the response back on the site (Quoting is one such feature of the ‘web application’).
IN YOUR EXPERIENCE, which type of CMS would you recommend for such a site, do you think that wordpress has the ability to scale up to such a requirement (forms data and webservice calls to a database server)??
Typo3? Expression Engine?
Thanks for your time!!
Jonathan,
The two (app and CMS) are note necessarily related. Without knowing much about the app itself, you could probably just have that run on your website alongside any CMS you choose.
Can you setup a Wordpress site on your existing domain while keeping the current published site intact until the final roll out? your blog post is very nice
Sijispeak – absolutely. You can just install WordPress in a sub-folder of your original site, and once you get it how you want it, move it to the main folder of your site. Make sure to back up your existing website first. This video shows you how to Move WordPress once you’re ready to go live with it.
Hi Don
I’m a little confused about sub domains.
I want to install a wordpress test site on a sub domain of an existing site.
I was going to create a subdomain called test, which would have the path mysite.com/test.
My hosting provider is suggesting If I create a sub domain called test (create via Cpanel) its path will be test.mysite.com
Am I not understanding sub domains?
Keith, a sub-domain is different than a sub-folder.
The easiest way to do what you want is to install WordPress in a sub-folder, which would look like mysite.com/test.
A sub-domain is a different animal, and you don’t really need to go in that direction for what you’re trying to do.
The mist is clearing, thanks to you Don.
So I should be going the sub-folder route.
How do I create a sub- folder?
Do I use FTP or Cpanel?
You can use either – FTP is what I use, but many hosts provide a file manager in CPanel you can use.
How are you installing WordPress? If you are using SimpleScripts you can choose the folder easily when you install WordPress.
Hi Don.
My host uses ‘Softaculous’ now for installing Wordpress.
I’ve used Fantastico in the past but it looks as though they are changing to ‘Softaculous’ – not sure why.
So to create the subfolder using FTP, do I create the sub folder inside the public.html folder?
Yes, create the folder in the public_html folder if that’s where your existing site is installed.
Hi Don,
I have a WP-Multisite installation at my web host accounts root folder (public_html). I read in this post’s comments thread about “setting up a new site in a sub folder and then moving it to the public_html when done and the original site is backed up.
I’m trying to understand the domain mapping situation and “how deep” (how many levels) that mapping can occur or otherwise be allowed by the host.
I too am wanting to do a nested WP (also multisite) install in a sub-folder (add-on domain) or into a subdomain – though not as a temporary site but a fully separate, live site going forward.
Based on my testing both on LunarPages and HostMonster (sister company to BH) I can nest WP installations all day, but domain mapping only seems to work on the 1st level off the root folder, unless I use a virtual host and domain mapping WP plugins that lets me create a dynamic site list within ONLY the ROOT WP install.
Any thoughts? Am I discovering a limitation of most hosting providers, a limitation of the “internet” and the way DNS works within the context of WPMU . . . or is this a case of user error?
I’ve tested every scenario I can think of and I’m not getting where I want to be.
Thanks for any help or insights!!
Gary
Whether or no
Cheers Don
Really appreciate your help, but you don’t have a “donate” button.
What’s your twitter id, I’ll say a few kind words over there.
Thanks Keith – I’m @doncampbell on Twitter, and also on Google Plus here.
Found you on twitter Don
Left you a little message over there.
Keith
Excellent tutorial. Been wanting to work on a site online and then move it. Now I feel ready to do it! Thanks!
Hi Don,
This is Julius and I’d like to ask you something about my website. It was designed in Dreamwaver ($1500) but I had to leave the designer. At my new host ($20/month) they told me that I’m not able to edit text only if they convert the site into wordpress for $800. Any advice you have, please?
Thank you,
Julius
Hi Julius,
Dreamweaver is pretty common so you could find another person with Dreamweaver experience to update your site. I’ve had luck finding good people with all kinds of skill sets on Elance.
Or you could convert it over to WordPress so that it is easier for you to update. $800 sounds like a reasonable estimate for that.
Don, thank you for the advice,
Julius
Just to chip in: I guess it comes back to how often you edit/update/add text to your site. It it costs you $30-$100 every time then you can pretty quickly estimate the payback time for your $800 investment for a WordPress conversion.
Sometimes hosts will provide a proprietary tool for content management but I’ve become skeptical of such tools because they tend to lock you in. Fine until service standards fall or prices get too high.
HTH
thanks sir i was seeing for such kind of articles., as i want to move my site http://www.digitspark.com ,from blogger to wordpress. And your post have guided us well.
Hi Don
Anyone thinking of starting up a small business website… take Don’s advice and go with WordPress.
You won’t regret it.
If you must spend time on something, spend it on getting the right domain name.
Worth taking your time for that.
I have been exploring for a little for any high-quality articles or blog posts on this sort of area . Exploring in Yahoo I at last stumbled upon this web site. Reading this info So i am happy to convey that I’ve an incredibly good uncanny feeling I discovered just what I needed. I most certainly will make sure to do not forget this web site and give it a look on a constant basis.
This is a great article! I have a small business of cards, invitations, personalized gifts and currently have a website I’ve built through Intuit and use Paypal buttons for the payment. This process is quite cumbersome, I can’t offer discounts and am just trying to avoid as many fees as posssible (like selling on etsy). I was told to go with WordPress and some shopping cart plug ins – are there any you recommend? Do you think this sounds like a good fit for my business? I want to see if the business can support itself before diving in and spending tons of money on the website. Any help is appreciated! Thanks!
Hi Debi – Thank you!
GetShopped.org is a good shopping cart plugin for WordPress.
Hi there ,
Can you Pl let me know a website which would give access and support to Wordpress Templates. I am looking foward to buy some good number of Premuim Themes at an economical Cost .I would really appreciate if someone can help me out on the information requested ,Thanks
Dilip Kumar MN
Just one question what did we do before Wordpress? Its perfect for business blogs. cool post
I am looking for recommendations for wordpress plugins, easy is best, for Goggle Analytics. How hard do these need to be for new websites?
Hi Kristie,
The ability to paste your Google Analytics code snippet is built into many WordPress themes. But if you are using one that does not support that, then I recommend this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
Hi,
im new to blogging,wordpress, hosting etc… i am not very compu savvy but i managed to get wordpress.com blog started thru6 months of self research n youtube etc…..if anyone can help me plzz, i’d really appreciate it.
I researched hosting companies n decided on one, two and ended up canceling both.
It seems that i CAN’T import/export my blog from wordpress to a hosting company , without losing some info…..like themes, images,links, etc…
Does anyone have more info. on this issue, really be grateful
I also had issues in finding the “PLUGIN” button, on the side panel. So, i found out if you host your blog, you will have it. Well, with bluehost, i got it.
iPage, i didn’t.
Plzzzz help
Thank you,
Thanks for everything, Don. I will want to be using video on my website. Is it true that using video is a paid 60. a month feature on Wordpress.com?
Hi Robin,
You can just embed your YouTube videos on WordPress for free. That’s how I do it.
Trying to understand Wordpress . Seems like it would work well with my business.
Hey! I just want to give a huge thumbs up for the great info you might have here on this post. I will likely be coming back to your blog for more soon.
← Previous Comments
{ 35 trackbacks }