I remember when I got started online in 2004 – I built my first website page by page in Dreamweaver. I think it took me a week. Probably a 60 hour week!
And then, a few weeks later, experienced pro that I had now become, I had realized that my original design was pretty lacking, and so I had the brilliant idea of totally redesigning it.
Once again, by hand, page by page.
There goes another week. Too bad Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week was a few years from coming out at that time – I sure could have used it then!
Fast forward to the present.
I’ve now got over a hundred sites in my ‘collection’ and every single one is built in WordPress. WordPress has become the internet marketer’s best friend.
Google absolutely loves domains with strong keyword resonance (an excellent topic for a different day) and so we find ourselves with lots of little sites, and the odd one or two that get much larger, such as a good sized blog as this will become one day.
So you need a platform that is highly flexible.
Great for mini sites, and yet strong enough to grow into a very large site.
That’s exactly what WordPress has become.
The WordPress Community
One of the best parts about WordPress is the fact that there is a tremendous community built around it. Just about any bizarre idea you can conceive of can be accomplished in WordPress, and often someone has built a free plugin to allow you to do that.
Let’s look a bit more closely at the main changes you can make to your site through WordPress.
Themes
Themes control the overall look and feel of your site, from the visitor’s perspective. How many columns do you want, what kind of navigation, your footers and all that stuff is controlled by your theme.
There are thousands of free themes online, and at least hundreds of premium ones. In my opinion, and experience, if you find a premium option that is going to solve the problem you have in front of you at the time, it is worth paying for.
With the release of WordPress 3.0, they changed the default theme to Twenty Ten. This theme is head and shoulders above the previous default one, which wasn’t very useful. However, this new TwentyTen theme is so handy, I’ve started using it for all of my new mini sites. So now you don’t even need to find yourself a new theme! In fact, I saw the member’s area for the recently launch Mobile Monopoly is actually built on this default theme.
I got a bit of a chuckle out of that.
Plugins
Plugins allow you to add all sorts of functionality to your site. Want to prevent your site from getting spammed? Something to increase security? How about a comment voting feature? Or perhaps a collapsing categories menu? All of these things would take a ridiculous amount of time and effort to create on your own in a static site, but with WordPress they are all available as free plugins.
Developers
If you’ve never touched html or php before, then WordPress can be intimidating. But the good news is, you can learn pretty much everything you need to learn either by free, or for a few bucks – and better yet, if you’ve got no interest in learning yourself, you can easily outsource pretty much anything you can think of to somebody else to do for you. Oftentimes for just a few bucks.
Why You Need a Site (WordPress)
The three requirements for making money are:
- Get traffic (prospects),
- Give them an offer,
- And convert them to a sale.
Assuming we’re dealing online here (and we are) then you’re going to need a website. Sure, lots of guys are going to say “you can do it without a site” – and to be fair, in some cases you can do that.
You can mask and redirect a URL directly to an offer. I even recently discovered a service that lets you do that, and then add a popup of your own to the page you’re directing to, so you could essentially build your list while direct linking to an affiliate offer (how cool is THAT?!). But even as intensely cool as that is, if you want to truly establish yourself in the market place, the only way is to use a website.
Sure – you can have a YouTube channel (and you should), or a Facebook fan page (and you should) but don’t ever let those be the sole place of interacting with your customers. You become dependent on very fickle third parties, and your long term business stability is always in question.
Far better to use all these tools to supplement your own site.
And on that site, you should be running WordPress. It is the simplest, easiest, most robust and flexible solution that I’ve ever come across for building websites.
Oh – I just about forgot to mention: It’s free.
