10 Reasons Small Businesses Need a WordPress Website
Having spent over five hours writing Web content changes into a Word doc in order to send to the client’s Web designer, I realized that WordPress is one of those “best kept secrets” that businesses need to know.
Many people know of WordPress as being a blogging platform, but few realize you can use it for your company Website as well. I’ve come up with 10 reasons why small business owners and marketers should consider a WordPress Website.
1. It’s easy to make changes — Typos, SEO tweaks, copy changes, all are easy to do. Just open a page, make a change, and you’re done. No more sending Word docs to designers or trying to do it yourself using complex programs such as Dreamweaver.
2. You can find a plugin for just about anything — Want breadcrumb navigation? There’s a plugin for that. Want to allow people to view your most popular blog posts or retweet them? You can find plugins for those functions as well.
3. You can incorporate your blog — Instead of maintaining two sites, you can add your blog to your Website and in the process, send all that really lovely traffic to one site. Woot!
4. You can incorporate your newsletter — One thing I struggled with for a long time is newsletter html redundancy. Not only did I have to produce code for the Constant Contact interface (xhmtl, to be exact) but I had to produce html code for the Website in order to archive each issue. It was a total pain in the butt and cost money, too.
Thanks to WordPress, I can now easily add each issue to my site and in the process, my newsletter archive page is updated automatically. Even better, people can now leave comments on each issue versus having to email me.
5. You can make SEO tweaks on the fly — Using the All in One SEO Pack plugin, it’s really easy to develop Title and meta tags, plus the plugin tells you the character count of each. Previous to WordPress, I had to write my Title and meta tags in Word and then use the “word count” feature to determine the character count.
When you want to make minor changes to a tag, you open the page and make them. Presto, you’re done.
6. It’s easy to add new pages — Once you have your Website template in place, it’s super easy to make new pages and post them to to your site — an important consideration now that we’re all content creators / publishers.
7. It’s easy to add video — As Matt Cutts of Google stated, the search engine is looking to see if sites now incorporate video. WordPress makes is very easy to add video clips.
8. Your site is smart-phone friendly — WordPress sites render really well on iPhones, Android and other smart phone devices.
9. You save time — Instead of back and forth, back and forth between multiple people over email, you can create a page in WordPress and have people view it and/or edit it in “Draft” mode.
10. You save money — You can make lots of simple changes on your own in a quarter of the time. (For more advance changes, I do call on my WordPress designer. I also use him for help with plugins as some of them can get a little tricky.)
Can you think of other reasons why small business owners and marketers need a WordPress-enabled Website?
March 16th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Great post Diana, couldn’t agree more. We are building more and more websites for our clients in WordPress all the time for all the reasons you mentioned above. The key with all this is that you get to spend more time crafting your content and MARKETING your business online and not wrestling with complicated code or expensive editing charges. If anyone out there is interested in having their website re-built using WordPress don’t hesitate to give FirstTracks a call at 603-924-1978.
March 16th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Dianna, this is a great post and very timely. I have used WordPress as the base for several small business sites, including my own, and have also incorporated their blog tool into larger and more complex sites. Too many small businesses are spending thousands of dollars on CMS development tools and editing on their sites, when their dollars could be far better spent in attracting new visitors to a site with all of the bells and whistles offered for virtually free within WordPress.
Thanks for the checklist,
Melissa
March 16th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Melissa and Mark, Thank you for your feedback. I agree that WP lets companies actually market themselves via content rather than struggling to constantly manage updates.
March 17th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Dianna, My personal business site is built on WordPress, and I love it. The one addition I would make is that it is great for people like me who like to tinker. While I often create my pages in Word, I always find myself making changes once I see the content on the site. It’s great to be able to make tweaks until I am happy with it instead of having to work with a third-party (adds up to a lot of time and money).
March 17th, 2010 at 11:30 am
Michele,
Yes, I completely agree. It’s one thing to write copy in Word and another thing altogether to see it “live.” I often tinker with copy after I’ve published it — it can sometimes take me weeks to get something exactly right.
March 17th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Dianna,
Very nice summary. I was using WordPress for a long time, recently I switched from php to .net, from OS to the free edition of commercial CMS (Kentico). And must say that although I was previously quite happy with WordPress (some minor security issues), the change was worthy. I understand that reading about open source CMSs is more interesting for wider audience, however, I would like to get a summarzy of the free editions of commercial CMS. Especially because, these “cuted” versions are usually well equipped for the Small businesses. Getting their list with short review shall be helpful, providing the alternative to the well known OS CMSs.
March 27th, 2010 at 2:47 am
Wordpress is a great secret when it comes to selecting a CMS. I just had a client tell me the other day, “We heard WordPress was limiting!” I told her that was anything but true and in fact, it was the perfect fit for this organization’s web site. I have been using WordPress almost exclusively in site development for my clients.
March 27th, 2010 at 11:06 pm
Link, What I love about WordPress are the plugins. I have wanted bread crumb navigation for forever. Once I moved to WP, my designer simply added in the plugin — presto, we’re done.
May 18th, 2010 at 10:57 pm
Thanks for the great post Dianna. I agree that WordPress makes it really easy to make changes. You mentioned typos, SEO tweaks and copy changes. I would also add that it’s very easy to change the design of your site. Take your pick from one of the thousands of free themes or pay a relatively small amount for a premium theme and activate it with the touch of a button.