WordPress Websites: Your first social media tool

A website is the first tool of your online presence and in so many ways it is your first social media tool. This is particularly true if you are using a WordPress website. Why? WordPress websites are well organized, generally have clean code, and have a seemingly endless supply of plugins that help with social media, and general audience interaction.In the few seminars cnctNOW has organized this past year people came up to me and told me that they weren’t really happy with their website. This generally starts a conversation about how hard it is to maintain, update, and how they have to pay so much for someone to "work on" their site. They almost universally spend way more than they need to for their websites. Some of these websites are "custom" coded sites that have no content management system (CMS), no blog feature, and no tools for updating information, and these are the sites that cost the most. People are paying enormous amounts of money to have someone create a website for them that is attractive but ultimately useless and basically static…and what they are getting is lower search results, higher bills, and fewer customers. WordPress can fix all of that.

You’re Looking at a WordPress Website

The site you are looking at is a WordPress website (bena11.sg-host.com not the atrocity in the picture) . It is developed using FREE software, free templates, and inexpensive hosting. I can update any page in minutes. I can change navigation, or even the entire site appearance with just a few clicks of the mouse. I can add depth through blogging. I can add interactivity with forms, social buttons, videos, polls, eCommerce, and more through the addition of innumerable plugins most of which are free. The list of things you can’t do with a WordPress website is much smaller than the things you can do with a WordPress website.

What does it take to get a WordPress Website?

Most hosting companies have a really great user interface that will walk you through the setup and a basic tutorial on how to use WordPress. I use BlueHost for my hosting company and their control panel for managing your hosting is cPanel which is probably one of the easiest hosting management tools I’ve ever used. But for many people it will be intimidating because they don’t understand the basic premise behind a website, or CMS. There are services that can be used to help you set that up, including the recently introduced options from cnctNOW. Learning WordPress is relatively easy. Creating new posts, pages, and managing your search engine optimization can all be done with very little training.

What about all the rest?

Blogger, Drupal, Joomla, and others all have their advantages. If you find a really easy to use template on any of those platforms I encourage you to use it and make the most of all the tools available for those platforms. My experience, however, is that Drupal and Joomla are too advanced for average users and Blogger doesn’t have quite as many options as one might need for a business website (after all it is a blogging platform).

New offering from cnctNOW

cnctNOW was always intended to be a social media consulting company first and foremost. Over time it became more and more clear in working with social media clients that they had neglected the first tool of social media, their website. This has led to WordPress website setup as a new offering from cnctNOW. This is a natural extension of our emphasis on social media and a perfect tool to add to the list of services that we want to provide our clients. In an effort to make these powerful tools available to as many people as possible we have focused on making sure the costs of start up are not only competitive but absurdly reasonable relative to the many options you might get from design and marketing companies across the area.