Open Source has certainly ushered in a whole new era of website design and deployment. Gone are the days of taking weeks or months to design a great looking and highly functional website, only to be at the mercy of a webmaster to make changes and post content in a timely manner. With open source, websites can be deployed in much less time with much more functionality than standard websites.
And leading the chage is WordPress.
The WordPress framework is simply a thing of beauty, a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL that allows you to make a website, blog, or both for your business. It has numerous features including a plug-in architecture and template system. Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of your website by simply plugging in the piece of software to your website. WordPress is a perfect solution for small business owners because it can be customized to suit your desire, from aesthetics to functionality, Wordpess has it all.
“It was first released on May 27, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg[1] as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of February 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 32.5 million times.[8]“
It allows the design great looking websites, that include a built-in Content Management System (CMS), because they are a CMS. A CMS is vital to allow the standard user to add content at will instead of waiting for your web master. Great content is the foundation of all websites and CMS sites provide the best opportunity of creating one.
WordPress is one open source framework I strongly recommend to my clients, due to its simplicity and powerful advantages, below are just some of them advantages:
- Most Internet Marketers use WordPress for the inherent power and simplicity
- Most Internet Marketers use WordPress, and there is good reason for that – power and simplicity
- Offers you tremendous SEO out-of-the-box – you add an optimization factor simply by using the framework
- Easy to write and publish new content with no webmaster
- It can be a web site, a blog, or both
- The source is FREE to use, you only pay for custom design and web hosting
- Infinite design and feature customization
- Plugins – one of the strongest feature of the framework makes it simply the most powerful framework
- Access to WordPress community of contributors numbering over 10,000 to assist with design, programming, training or consulting (size of community drives competitive pricing)
Wordpress is the most popular open source platforms available today, and for good reason. The community that backs WordPress continues to grow at staggering rates. What does this mean for you, the business owner? The platform will continue to grow and get better and better. I do not see anything touching WordPress in the distant future.
This is only an introduction to WordPress for the small business community. I will be exploring WordPress more in future articles, along with how you as a business owner, can leverage this great platform to grow your business online. Stay tuned.
About Dan DeRoeck
Dan DeRoeck is an SEO [search engine optimization] and SEM [search engine marketing] consultant that assists businesses of all sizes attain a strong Internet presence. His SEO philosophy is to build a strong organic traffic base using methods that stand the test of time, leveraging strong content with powerful SEO methods. User engagement is at the heart of his strategy, using Web Analytics to continually measure and improve position for his clients.
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- Small Business Marketing Efforts for 2011
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4 Responses to WordPress for Small Business – A Match Made in Heaven
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This was very interesting I was not very familiar with WordPress until I read your blog. I appreciate that his is just an introduction into this software and I look forward to your future articles in the coming weeks. I am particularly looking forward to how the business owner can use this to grow on-line. Thank you for sharing this with us and please don’t delay in putting the other articles out there as well. Great job putting this information together and introducing us that were unfamiliar with WordPress to it.
I recently started to use Word Press blogs for designing multiple blogs in the past year and a half. However, I first used an earlier version of Word Press five years ago. The most significant improvement to this platform I have noticed over the years is the amount and quality of the themes available. When I first started using Word Press on a regular basis and began searching for themes, I had a hard time finding impressive, ready made themes. That wasn’t a major problem because I have web development skills and could use any theme as a base and then customize it to my specifications. But recently, I encountered a couple of companies that develop some really cool themes. These are by far the best themes on the market. And that illustrates another great feature of the Word Press platform. The simplicity of the code that enables you to design your own templates. Themes are big business and these companies have established a large following who pay memberships fees for the right to use their themes.
Hi Nancy,
You are right. The themes have come a long, long way since 2003! This has also made the competition pretty tough, which eventually is returned in quality. It really comes down to simply searching for the right theme for your blog or business.
Dan
I used to not like Word Press because initially, I found it too limited and technical to customize the basic available themes. But I continued doing research for themes and found some companies that design some pretty cool themes. Shortly after that, I learned that you can use a Fire fox web developer’ extension to examine the HTML and CSS construction of any web site. This helped me to learn about the construction of themes and enabled me to replace graphics and code snippets to customize any theme. Now I think Word Press is one of the most seamless blog and content management systems to customize.