What is WordPress and Why do I care?

Often small to Mid size companies spend a lot of resources behind designing a website. Spending money behind a web developer, web designer etc. They would have to spend time analyzing your business needs and other such requirements. You would try to explain what you need and when they come back with a half finished product you feel like you are in a terrible mess. But since you have alreayd spent a good amount of money and time you feel you should continue with the venture and see it through to the end. Finally you end up with something that looks almost like what you need with a strong dependency on those technology vendors namely the web developer and the web designer. If your business needs are really unique then you may have no way out from that scenario. However, chances are your business needs are not that complicated that warrants a custom built website costing hundreds or thousands of dollars with people maintaining it 24/7. If thats the case, then lucky you. Modern computer technology has brought you the marvel of “WordPress“.

In this article I’ll try to briefly describe the benefits of WordPress.

WordPress allows you to customize your entire website via custom theme options, plugins, custom menu bars etc. You control all of these from an admin panel where you log in using a username password created during wordpress installation. Now once you are inside the admin panel you can make all sorts of changes to your website. You can copy paste your favourite artice from Ms Word and paste it in a blog post then publish it with beautiful press like fonts in your webiste. And to do all these you don’t even need a webmaster :)
Lets say you didn’t like the look of your website and wanted a completely different look, you don’t have to make an appointment with the web designer neither the web developer. With wordpress you can do that almost instantly. Now themes are not just a skin for your website its also a way of organizing content. There are several types of themes such as Magazine, Blog, Portal etc. There are also some themes that works just like a job board or kijiji (please note kijiji is not made of WordPress, but there are kijiji likes themes available)
There are many free themes available and also premium paid ones. (But I found the free themes are more than enough to meet my needs.)
In my HTML version website: http://www.skchandon.com/wp
I have 2 types of content: 1) Static Pages and 2) Blog posts.
Blog posts allow comments to be added by the visitors of your website which you can reply back.
This is perfect for holding a sort of Q/A session for the potential customers of the website. You can start a blog post about a topic and as the visitors to your site starts commenting on them you reply them back.
Also, all wordpress (wp) themes are search engine optimized. This means any word that appears in your website will be visible to search engines.
So if you have many unique visitors to your site then those words would draw higer rank for your website in a particular search engine.
This is a huge benefit as it has catalytic effect on the success of your website. The more visitors you get the more ranks you get. The more ranks you get the more higher your website will appear in a persons search when they are searching for keywords such as (Tax, income tax, return etc.) That means you will get more and more visitors. So if you can keep a steady source of interesting tax topics every once or twice a week and then share them on facebook (which you can do very easily from a wordpress blogpost) then your friends will view your posts easily through your facebook wall.

Now that I have listed the “good” of WordPress, let me describe the “bad”.
The “bad” is spam!
As I mentioned before, when you publish a blog post then the visitors to your website can add comments to the post. Now these visitors can be an actual person or “bots” that are designed to publish comments randomly with certain ad words in a website. Often you might have to filter through hundreds of comments to find a comment left by an actual person. This could be real problem. Well worry not. The answer is quite simple, wordpress plugins. what are plugins you may ask? Plugins are simple tools that allow you to control different aspect of your website. For example, in the above case we need to stop comments left by “bots” (or automated computer programs). So we install a CAPTCHA(Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) plugin. One good CAPTCHA plugin is: SI CAPTCHA. You can either visit their website or search for the plugin in your “admin panel>Plugins>Add New” section. Once you install that plugin and activate it then all the comment box will contain a small image at the bottom which the user has to decipher and provide correct results. Most “bots” can’t do that and voila you have reduced your spam to almost 0%.

Well there are plenty more I could discuss about WordPress but instead I’ll leave it upto you. If you have access to your website via FTP then make a backup of your existing web content first. Then download the latest version of wordpress and then upload it via FTP to your website’s home directory. Then follow this link to install WordPress as they have done a much better job than I could have done :)

Once you finish installing don’t forget to login to the admin panel and install the CAPTCHA plugin or else you will be swamped with spam messages.

So if you want a website that you can manage yourself and it still looks stunning costing you 0 dollars then WordPress may be your answer.