I’m often asked what type of site a business needs. Well, that depends on what you’re doing with the site. If you just want one page where you put a logo and some contact information, then a simple HTML template will do. If you’re running an ecommerce site (think Amazon), then you need special ecommerce software running your site. If you’re doing a huge, information based authority site, then something more robust like Joomla might be your best platform.
If, however, you need to do a little (or even a fair amount) of all of these three, then you can easily power your site with WordPress.
At it’s inception, WordPress was invented as blogging software. Most people used WordPress to run personal type blogs. You know the kind where you post what you ate for breakfast and also put pictures of your last trip to the beach.
Bloggers soon learned that WordPress could do much more than just provide you with a personal blog. As WordPress started to become the dominant blogging software, it’s functionality was also extended to the point that WordPress can no longer been seen as just blogging software, but as a total content management system, or CMS.
If you want a site where you just have general information about your business, a home page, a contact page, an about page, etc, then WordPress can do this elegantly. If you want to include feeds for a moderate number of products you sell, you can do this also with WordPress. If you run an information based business (this site is an example), then WordPress, of course, works excellently.
Most smaller businesses’ websites can be made easily with a WordPress platform.
Another reason to use WordPress for your business is there are thousands of themes you can use with your site. A “theme” controls what your site looks like. Best of all, most themes are free. And even if they cost money, they’re not expensive. No matter what you’re business is, I could probably find a theme that’s a good fit in about thirty minutes.
If you want a theme that’s unique to you, you can get a designer to actually design a theme for only a few hundred dollars.
All of these issues are great reasons to consider using WordPress for your business’s site. There are, however, other reasons to use WordPress, which are even more compelling.
There are basically three legs to the “SEO stool”. We could name the legs 1) technical, 2) on-page content, and 3) backlinks. Sure, it can get more complicated than this, but really this about sums it up.
WordPress really rocks when it comes to how your webpages are put linked together in a simple way, which fosters good human navigation and also easy navigation for Google’s spiders. In a nutshell, WordPress provides for navigation that proceeds from the top level through well labeled and understood category pages to the individual pages, themselves. So, in internet architecture terms, you get easy navigation from your top level domain name through secondary pages to tertiary pages.
My favorite thing about WordPress, though, is it’s flexibility. With WordPress I can create a blog, a large authority site, a small ecommerce site, a site with five or so pages about a small business, or even a one page sales letter.
