Small Business Websites the Easy Way

Let’s be real with each other for a minute. Building a good looking and functional website can be challenge. Once it’s built, keeping it up to date can feel like an ongoing and losing battle. This month I have a few suggestions to help ease your website pain and turn that chore into a pleasure.

Most small business websites are built in one of two ways. Either you know a family member or teenage neighbor who can put together a basic website, or your website hosting provider has a template based system that can help you build a website by uploading your logo and some text. Neither is a bad solution if you just need something to start, but the result is often lacking in quality department.

Larger companies have the marketing funds and access to talent to build a top notch website with all of the bells and whistles. And if they are smart, they add in some administrative capabilities for their staff to easily add new content without needing to understand html, javascript, and a host of other web technologies. They understand that good websites are constantly changing and getting better. Anyone who has hired an external web design firm understands that this route can quickly become very costly and limiting.

In the end what you want is a solution with the following capabilities. First, you need the ability to edit your website in a simple and efficient manner that doesn’t entail tracking down the nearest IT guy. This includes uploading pictures and video. Second, it would be really nice if you could update the style, colors, and layout whenever you like. Calling your local graphic artist and asking for a website makeover and then rebuilding the entire site can be a nightmare. What we are describing here is a Content Management System (CMS) and traditionally they existed only at the large company level due their cost and complexity. So what’s the alternative that doesn’t require spending the entire marketing budget?

WordPress.org

In recent years several open source CMS solutions have been built with the small business in mind. My favorite is WordPress from a company called Automatic. At first glance, WordPress looks like a web blogging solution. And it is. But taking a closer look reveals a solution with all of the power and flexibility of large CMS solutions, but without the associated complexity and cost.

As an open source solution, the software itself is free, along with a large collection of website themes. These themes allow you to customize the look of your website in a very easy to manage way. No more waiting for the designer to get back to you. Don’t like the current theme? Change it. Need to add new pages, images, and video? No problem. You can even add additional functionality through the use of plugins, which extend the website’s features without involving special programming. It really is that easy.

The good news is that most web hosting providers are now offering WordPress as optional software for you to install on your site. It requires the php programming language and a MySql database to run, but those are very standard defaults at nearly all web hosting providers. So do yourself a favor and upgrade your website to use WordPress. Your website will look better, more up to date, and cost you less in the long run. And that is something to blog about.