Use WordPress for Easy Site Management

If your plan is to keep the site somewhat small and easily manageable, then your best bet would be to use WordPress as the foundation for your site.

Note

Disclaimer: Before I go on, I know I'll get e-mails from WordPress fans protesting this tip, and heralding WordPress as perfectly fine for large sites as well. After all, there are plenty of examples of successful, very large sites, such as TechCrunch (an online technology magazine), that use WordPress as their foundation. Fair enough. It's really a matter of personal preference. I believe that owner/operators of large sites are better off building and maintaining their own technology rather than using something off the shelf. It's more attractive to investors and potential buyers (should you ever want to sell your business), and ultimately you get to maintain more control over your site and any features you want to add.

Moving on, WordPress is a free tool for managing your content and building your site. Although it began as a way for people to build and manage their own blogs, many small companies have begun to see the value in using WordPress as a basis for their entire site—whether or not they have a blog as part of it.

There are three great things about using WordPress to build your site:

Consider using a WordPress site if you're planning to launch a blog or media site on which to sell advertising, if you want to sell a product to a somewhat limited audience, or to promote your services.

Getting a WordPress site up and running is fairly easy, even if you're not a tech person:

The easiest and least-expensive way (it'll be free) to launch a site is to go to WordPress.com and simply follow their step-by-step directions. I wouldn't suggest this, though—the page templates you'll have to choose from will be limited and relatively ugly, and you'll be required to have the word “wordpress” in your domain name (yourname.wordpress.com ). You can pay WordPress to remove their name from the domain, but there are still better ways to do this.
To take the more professional route, sign up with a larger host (I went over choosing a good host earlier in this part). Make sure the host supports WordPress (most of them do). Secure your domain name, select your hosting package, and install WordPress (typically just a button or two to click from their dashboard).
Buy a template you like. Any number of sites sell inexpensive templates, which you can find by simply googling “WordPress templates.” My favorite is themeforest.com
Search for the plug-ins and widgets you want to include on your site (your WordPress dashboard will make it easy to search through available plug-ins, and show you the most popular topics among other WordPress users), and install them onto your site.

Note

Be careful when you add third-party applications. Research the developers well, and limit the number of plug-ins that you include on your site. The more you add onto your site by developers you don't know, the more you open your site up to potential hacks, malware, and other issues. Just because a widget looks nice and seems to work doesn't mean it was built correctly. Hackers can take advantage of errors made in the code.

Obviously, this will take a little bit of time, and you'll probably find a few more minor steps you'll need to cover along the way. But in general, building a WordPress site is fairly easy. It can be so easy, in fact, that it's worth noting that WordPress development can be a money maker for you as well. If you can master building WordPress sites, you could do quite well building these sites for small businesses, charging hundreds or even thousands of dollars per site, while only spending a few bucks for a pre-designed template and a day or so worth of work.

(MLA 8^th Edition)