One of the most important agents and possibly the one with the widest outreach is your company’s website. The website is the online front of your business. In this day and age, when most of your customers will come from the online community the importance of having the best possible website represent your business cannot be over emphasized.
However, PhormSecure you may not always have the resources or the kind of technical manpower required to develop and run a top notch website.
Fortunately for you, there is help to be had. There are many open source platforms that allow you to use their facilities to build your own website. Using them, building an attractive website is now easy as pie. One of the best open source platforms for the job is a Content Management System (CMS) called WordPress.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free and an open source CMS which also functions as a popular blogging tool. It is built upon PHP and MySQL. It was released on 27th May, 2003 by Matt mulleweg and has since then become the most popular CMS available on the web. As of June 2012, WordPress is being used by 33% of all new websites. Around 25.7% of all websites listed in Alexa’s Internet’s “top 1 million websites” use WordPress. Version 3.2 has been downloaded almost 65 million times as of June, 2012. To find out even more and download WordPress check their official website.
Why do you need a WordPress website?
As already explained earlier, the importance of websites for your business demands that nothing but the best will do. Here are the top reasons why you should go for a WordPress website.
- Creating an optimized website is not an easy task. A website is customer service, relationship builder, sales, advertisement, and more all rolled into one package. WordPress makes this process a lot easier for you by providing you with custom built tools.
- WordPress is an open source program. That means that it is completely free. It can be used on any commercial or personal projects under the laws laid down under the GPL license. There are no particular restrictions imposed upon the utilization of this technology. Instead of paying an annual fee to a company to develop and maintain your website, it will be much cheaper for you to keep the development of the website in house by paying one employee to do the same job using WordPress.
- WordPress is very user friendly. You do not need to be an expert to either install or use WordPress. Most web hosting services offer one click setup options. A lot of documentation and online tutorials are available to help you on your way. In case you want someone with experience in WordPress to do the job for you, then there is no dearth in the market for such developers.
- WordPress has a huge collection of free website themes to choose from. If you are not satisfied with the free themes, there is a host of low cost themes to choose from. You may also hire a developer to develop a theme as per your requirements.
- WordPress also provides you with a huge range of open source extended plugins for every possible task. Using these plugins you can make the website look the way you want. Installation of these plugins is really easy – often just a simple click from the admin panel is required. The plugin database numbers over 18,000.
- WordPress code is in compliance with the standards laid down by the World Wide Web consortium. This is important for compatibility across browsers, for usability and also for SEO purposes.
- WordPress comes with stringent inbuilt checks to eliminate all spam elements and comments that find their way to your website. A large number of constantly upgraded plugins keep being released that add that much more bite to anti spam measures.
WordPress Installation
WordPress is simple enough to install. All in all, the entire process of installing WordPress takes under 5 minutes. Additionally, many web hosts also provide tools which automatically install WordPress.
WordPress and SEO
WordPress is specially designed to return optimal returns to search engines. In other words, WordPress is Search Engine Optimized. The features and tools used by WordPress help search engines to achieve greater accessibility to information inside a WordPress website so as to include that information/content in its database. Several plugins and hacks also aid in this process of achieving search engine optimization. After all being listed in the first page of top search engines will help your business by a great deal by getting you noticed by a wide untapped customer base.
A few recommended plugins would be
Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.
Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.
SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.
All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.
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