1. Build from scratch in HTML.  Puh-lease. This is 2010. I knew there had to be something better.
2. Hire someone else to do it. Overpay them, get crappy results, and whine to my wife that there has to be a better way. Been there, done that, annoyed the wife.
3. Figure out how other people are learning how to slap together great-looking websites so fast. Bingo!

I took some expensive courses in internet marketing and found out everyone at stage 3 was using WordPress. If you’ve only heard vaguely about WordPress you know it’s a blog, but at this point in its career WordPress is a general purpose website builder made infinitely malleable through the use of plugins. You can change the site’s looks dramatically using free (or paid) themes. There are well over a thousand of them available at the WordPress site, and they can be used commercially too. Other, “premium” themes are available at a price elsewhere.

The problem with WordPress is that it’s a big piece of software. As with all such software, I knew that most of the time you only need 5% of its capabilities. I didn’t know what made up that 5%. When I finally learned it, I decided to create a detailed, lavishly illustrated step-by-step guide so that you don’t have to learn the other 95%. I now use that very guide to build complete websites quickly. They usually take much less than an hour to get up and running. My 11-year-old daughter did it in far under an hour.

More later but if you want to check out the sales page see On the Web in an Hour. You can get a free taste of it here. I will arrange a discount for eSnipe users during some as-yet-determined introductory period.

I’m interested in your reactions to the garish sales page, which internet marketers assure me is the best way to make sales to casual visitors. On the Web in an Hour took me a lot of time to create. I’m not sure it’s the best way to present a serious product.

Think very carefully before you ignore the benefits of a blog-based site. Without question, you can make a site that simply does not look or act like a blog. But blogging gives your site business and search engine advantages that no other website format offers.

1. Because blogs are updated frequently, search engines love them.

Fresh, original content that’s organized clearly for human consumption is irresistible to search engines. There’s nothing a search engine likes more.

2. Keyword searches happen more naturally

That means people are more likely to find your site when searching by keyword. If your competitors aren’t doing this and you are, you’ll pull quickly ahead of them. And if they’ve beaten you to the punch, you’ll have no choice but to meet or exceed their efforts. The search engine juice is too important these days. Even if you think you’re not a news-based site, you’re probably wrong.

3. Event announcements get spidered faster

If you schedule events for the public, if you want people to learn about new features, if you want the community as a whole to know what you’re doing, or if you want to attract new customers, short news items make it easy for people to keep up.

4. People can subscribe to your site

Using RSS feeds people can subscribe to your blog and get notified automatically when new content is added. If your site is for a restaurant or store, this is a fantastic way to advertise specials and keep people coming back to your site. If your site is for a church or service organization, there’s no easier way to keep people informed of important goings-on. Try asking your webmaster to add a feature like that to a site built from HTML instead of WordPress.

5. Comments mean community

Blogs allow comments to be posted on them (although you can disable this feature, or control what comments get posted). Why is this important? First, it increases interest in your site and gets people to come more often. Second, it increases search engine results because those comments add original content to your site, with little to no effort on your part! How bad can it be to get free help developing your web presence? And finally, it is a brilliant way to network and to learn about new developments in your field that you may never have known otherwise.

Blow your competition away. Build great sites in minutes. Make the changes yourself, and do it without learning HTML, FTP, FBI, CIA or anything else. Just get the job done with your browser, no specialized tools, and be On The Web in an Hour. ]]> http://easyonme.com/blog/on-the-web-in-an-hour/wordpress-blogs-make-great-business-sites/feed/ 0 http://easyonme.com/blog/on-the-web-in-an-hour/wordpress-rocks-how-i-built-this-site-in-less-than-a-day/ http://easyonme.com/blog/on-the-web-in-an-hour/wordpress-rocks-how-i-built-this-site-in-less-than-a-day/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 23:45:53 +0000 Easy On Me http://easyonme.com/blog/?p=55 This probably sounds familiar: I have a lot of ideas, including a lot of business ideas. I needed a fast way to get them up on the web without having to translate them through a webmaster. I thought it should be cheap, easily maintainable by me, and attractive. I also wanted an easy to to back up the site, and to be able to restore it or move it to another webhost if necessary.

But I don’t want to be a blogger

I spent a long time looking around at the various solutions. WordPress was one of them, but it seemed to have some problems. First of all, it was a blogging platform, and blogging was only one of the things I wanted to do. Second, the installation instructions looked a bit… intimidating. I’m a programmer but also a businessman and hobbyist. The three don’t always intersect. When I’m thinking like a businessman, I just want to get the job done effectively and fast. My interest is in communicating ideas and reaching a large targeted audience quickly. As a programmer, well, I’m a craftsman. And as the old engineering maxim has it, choose two of these three options: Fast, Cheap, Good. Finally, WordPress just didn’t seem like it would have all the features I needed. So I kept looking.

By coincidence, I became eSnipe’s director of marketing late last year. Suddenly, putting up new websites wasn’t a matter of craftsmanship or having a cool hobby I wanted people to know about. Suddenly getting a robust, manageable, attractive website online was a business priority. So I did what any self-respecting business type would do.  I took an expensive internet marketing course on the company nickel. And when I say expensive, I mean $5,000. Since I own the company, that amount wasn’t just an impressive number. It was a number I had to explain to the directly shareholders, a.k.a. my wife.

What do you do when only results matter, not your designer’s ego?

The internet marketing world is a fascinating one, by the way. As you might imagine, there are charlatans-but many fewer than I had expected to find. I came away from that course with some powerful impressions.

• It’s all about results. Internet marketing means that every dollar you spend on advertising of any kind needs to be balanced directly against the bottom line. This ain’t for Coke or Abercrombie & Fitch, where hundreds of millions can be spent on nebulous, impossible-to-measure “image statements”.
• In my experience, many of the “best” web designers are far more interested in impressing other designers than they are in site usability or, horror of horrors, conversion rates (number of people who visit your site vs. the number of people who buy). These people have no pull in the internet marketing world. None. Nada.
• It’s all about delivering a high-quality product that answers people’s needs directly, now. Otherwise, you don’t make money. Very often these high quality products may not look as pretty as what you’ll find in a bookstore or on a magazine page, but they get right to the point and scratch a powerful itch.
• It’s done on the cheap, normally with software that costs nothing or is already on your computer.
• It’s a do-it-yourself business. Fortunes are routinely made by a guy and his computer late at night, after work and when the kids are asleep. These companies never start with a staff or venture funding.
• For all these reasons, their sites are built on WordPress a very high percentage of the time.

I had investigated WordPress a few years ago and had found it wanting. Things have changed. A  lot. WordPress can now easily be made to create sites that don’t look like blogs at all. It is fully equipped to let you create what looks like a standard HTML website, yet with none of the drawbacks (building an HTML website from scratch is time-consuming, bug-prone, such sites are exceptionally hard to extend with new features, and it’s very hard to add articles or news items to them without lots of time and specialized software).  Here’s a site I did illustrating that point. On the other hand, you can make a site that looks like a blog even quicker. EasyOnMe is one such example.

If you want to extend a WordPress site with new features and don’t have any technical knowledge, it couldn’t be easier. They have an architecture for plugins and widgets that means having to be a PHP expert to get the job done is a thing of the past. This architecture is well thought out and designed for end users too. Result: a massive market of WordPress plugins and widgets, the vast majority of them free!

If you look at the WordPress installation docs, you may run screaming in terror. Don’t. All you have to do is find a web host with cPanel and Fantastico. You’ll be able to install WordPress literally in seconds. Later, you’ll be able to uninstall or update it just as quickly. The trick is finding a web host with good 24 hour support by email or phone. There’s only one:  HostGator (affiliate link), and in my view they’re phenomenal. They also have an awesome moderated forum.

If you’re building a website for your small to medium sized business or other organization, you owe it to yourself to check out WordPress. I have developed an ecourse (free taste here) but you can do it all using the WordPress docs.