Wordpress Has It All!

Wordpress is a platform for creating web sites that use themes and plugins to provide functionality that you can tweak to your own preferences. Although the screenshot below looks very basic, this is just the default page you see after the initial installation. Once you have reached this stage the options really become almost infinite.

Image via Wikipedia

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. We need to start with the basics. First one is that we need to talk about the totally free option of using Wordpress.com to host your site or the self-hosting option. With the latter option you will need two extra things and these cost money. We are going to look at the self-hosted route as this will give you many more options.

1. A domain name
2. A hosting package

Now, your chosen domain should be given some thought. I have said elsewhere that for a business you need to think about registering more than one domain and here’s why:

1. You should (if you are a UK business) register a .co.uk and a .com domain. For example: www.mycompany.co.uk and www.mycompany.com. This is mainly to protect you from someone else registering the other one either by chance or for malicious reasons (to pass themselves off as your business).
2. You should also think about registering a domain (or domains) with keywords in them for your business sphere. So, if you are an marketing company and you specialise in PR marketing, you may want to have a domain with ‘marketing’ in or ‘PR’ or ‘public relations’. You might therefore look at possibilities such as www.prexperts.co.uk and www.prexperts.com (or www.pr-experts.co.uk and www.pr-experts.com).
3. You would choose the most appropriate domain as your ‘public’ url and have all the other domains point to your chosen url (e.g. www.pr-experts.co.uk).

As regards a hosting package if you are going down the Wordpress path then you have two options, either go with a hosting company that specialises in Wordpress hosting or choose one that provides an easy way to install Wordpress (usually through something like Fantastico in your admin cpanel). Do a Google search for ‘wordpress hosting’ and check out several companies. Also, read online reviwes and in trade magazines like .net who publish directories of hosting companies and do regular reviews. Check out their site at http://www.netmag.co.uk.

Next steps:

So, you have registered at least one domain, found a hosting package and got your basic wordpress installation up and running. At this point you should have something like the screenshot above. How do you turn this pretty uninspiring site into something that will keep visitors looking around for more than a few seconds and hopefully turn them into customers. Well, a lot depends on what kind of business you are running and who your customers are. If you are selling services rather than physical products then you will have different needs. An e-commerce site will need the WordPress e-Commerce plugin (freely available from http://getshopped.org). WP e-Commerce is a free bolt-on shopping cart that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online. It makes setting up shop incredibly easy. Plus they’ve had over 750,000 downloads!

Whatever kind of business you are in, you will want to have a much more interesting theme, which provides the overall look for your site. So, where do you get hold of these themes and what do they cost? Well, you can add new themes easily from within your Wordpress admin panel or you can download them from the web and then upload them easily to your site (again from within your admin panel). There are thousands of free themes available from the net (just Google ‘WP themes’).

However, you may wish to have a theme that is not so common that other sites which may be your competitors are also using. n that case, take a look at paid for themes. They start from around £10 and go up to a lot more, depending on whether you want them to be unique (i.e. no-one else will have the same theme on their site). Another option is to pay a developer to create a bespoke theme for your site and if you can afford t this is the best option as they will take into account your business and will have expert knowledge of the best plugins to use on your site to best meet your objectives and reach your customers. They should also have some knowledge of SEO to help you get high up in Google’s search results.

Check out elegantthemes for some great Premium Wordpress Themes and see what’s possible. You get unlimited access to their themes for just $39 and so this is a great way to start out. Each elegantthemes WordPress theme comes expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, and all are made compatible with the latest version of WordPress. Each template performs flawlessly in each of the most widely used browsers to ensure maximum functionality. Furthermore, all sidebars are made widget ready for your convenience.

In the next article we will look at what plugins you should have on your site.