WordPress rocks: How I built this site in less than a day

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.