Why traditional website publishing is dead (and why you should use Wordpress or similar CMS instead)

Summary: This articles discusses the benefits of using a Content Mangement System (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, etc, for creating your website; and compares the new technology to the old way of creating a website, that involved using a web designer and a static html site that went through various stages (mockup, conversion to html or “slicing”, feedback / review, and publication). In particular, it discusses the benefits of the WordPress platform for creating a small business or professional website; and the basic procedure for getting a WordPress professional or corporate website up and running.

Up until a few years ago, if you wanted a professional website, you hired a web designer.  You gave them all your content, your graphics, some ideas of what you wanted your site to look like, and a few thousand dollars.  They produced a “mockup” (snapshot of your future site) in Photoshop, and you went back-and-forth a few times with revisions.   After your final approval, the mockup was “sliced” (converted to an html template in Dreamweaver), the content added, and the site went live.  The entire process took from two weeks to two months.  The type of site produced is called a “static html website”.  It was possible for you to make minor changes to the content of the site, however, if you wanted to add pages or change the navigation structure, you had to go back to your designer.  If you wanted programmatic features such as a blog or a bulletin board (forum), it was extra.

Nowadays, unless we’re dealing with a very high-end or graphic-intensive site, nobody will settle for that.  Due to great improvements and huge popularity of open-source Content Management Systems (CMS), particularly Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, you can put up a nice-looking site in days rather than months, and at about one tenth the cost (or even for free).

In the rest of this article we’ll focus on Wordpress, since it is the easiest to use of the popular CMS’s and yet has all the functionality that is required by your typical small business website.

Wordpress is an open-source CMS that is optimized for blogging (which is the posting of sequential articles on a given topic or theme).  However, it is also very good at creating static pages (ie. web pages whose content is fixed such as “About us”, etc), which are the “bread and butter” of your average small business or self-employed website. In addition:

• Wordpress comes configured “out of the box” for the greatest search-engine visibility – you just need to set certain parameters correctly.  Also search-engines love blogs and other frequently updated content.
• You can easily add or delete pages, change your theme, and change your content, and the changes will be immediately reflected on your site and in the navigation structure of your site
• If you have special needs (such as a Calendar of events for example), it’s very likely that somebody somewhere has written a piece of code (called a “plugin”) that solves your problem, and is giving it away for free.  If it’s not free, it’s probably very cheap.  There are numerous plugins that turn Wordpress into a paid-membership site, which is a very nice way to sell your content down the road
• You can write your content offline using a tool such as the free Windows Live Writer, which makes it very easy to add rich content (images and videos) to your site and/or your newsletter.

Here is the process that you will typically go through to create a professional small business website using Wordpress:

1. Open a cPanel-enabled web hosting account, which costs $5-10/mth.
2. Install Wordpress from your web hosting account control panel using cPanel’s “Fantastico” application (about 5 min). Any Linux hosting will support Wordpress, but I like a cPanel hosting system for its user-friendliness and capabilities
3. Download, install and configure any of the excellent free Wordpress templates that are available on the web (about 15 min)
4. Download, install and configure the necessary plugins.  At minimum I recommend : All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Comment Relish, Subscribe to Comments, and Email Shroud (about 15 min)
5. Configure your newsletter system and add your newsletter signup code to your side-bar (about 15 min). See this article. Almost every small business needs a newsletter to stay in touch with customers
6. Create your content
7. Hire a web designer to make you a banner, or else find a free or inexpensive one, or else make it yourself in Photoshop
8. Your site goes live – tell all your friends and business associates.  It helps to have an active Linkedin or Facebook account for this.  If you have current customers, import them into your newsletter system. Although a courtesy email is recommended, you are allowed (under CAN-SPAM) to add people to your newsletter with whom you have already done business.
9. Continue writing great content of interest to your readers.  Some of them are sure to become customers.

Bottom line: your site will be up and ready for business in 4-8 hours of work, rather than months.

Just a few final tips if you are new to this:

1. Find a competent and reasonably-priced web person – but be sure to explain to them that you want to be educated.  There are plenty of people on the freelancer marketplaces (RentACoder, Guru, or Elance) who want your business.
2. Don’t obsess initially about your site’s design or presentation.  Just get the content out there.  You can easily change your presentation later.