Save Money On Web Site Design With A WordPress Business Blog

Many businesses turn to a web designer or a web design company when they first decide to build an online presence.

Although this may seem like the sensible and logical thing to do, if more business owners were aware of their options for taking their business online, they would most likely choose to start with a WordPress business blog site instead of a traditional website. Most of our clients are small business owners who initially invested thousands of dollars into getting a website built, only to discover later down the track that they have paid for a vehicle that they can’t drive. They own the vehicle, but someone else has the keys, because they need someone with technical skills to drive it.

Web designers generally focus most of their attention on how your site is going to look and not on how your online business is going to work.  As a result, most businesses end up paying for someone to figure out how to create them a website with a nice design, layout, colour scheme, graphics, etc., when that money would probably be better spent figuring out how to create a site that allows the business owner to change everything around (design, layout, colours, graphics, etc.) in order to test different ways of improving their results.

(slide from “Blog Vs Website: Which Is Better For Your Business?” Seminars)

Now … don’t get me wrong! I have nothing against web designers. They can help you create a professional web presence for your business, and that’s great. The important thing to remember, however, is that it is YOU – the business owner – who needs to be in control of your online presence, and not your web designer or web development team.

Let’s face it … web designers get paid to make their clients happy, not to make their clients sales. They really have no vested interest in the success of your business online. Web designers get paid for building you a web site. What you do with it afterwards is your business as far as their business is concerned.

The assumption that you or anyone else actually knows what is going to work online for your business is one of the main reasons why businesses end up with expensive web sites that produce little to no results.

Choosing The Right Online Vehicle For Your Business

In order to have a successful online presence, you need an online vehicle that YOU CAN DRIVE. You want the vehicle AND the keys to drive it.

(slide from “Blog Vs Website: Which Is Better For Your Business?” Seminars)

This is what a vehicle you CAN’T drive looks like:

• Your web designer controls your web presence (unless you know how to mess with web code)
• Your web designer manages your web content  (unless you know how to edit web pages)
• Your interaction with site visitors happens mostly when they fill in a contact form on your site
• You experience delays getting things uploaded or changed on your site
• You are charged a fee to make changes to your site
• Adding new features to your site incurs additional costs

Sounds familiar? The above is a description of how most business web sites operate.

A vehicle you CAN drive, on the other hand, looks like this:

• You control your online presence
• You manage your own content (you can make changes whenever you want without requiring technical skills or knowledge of web languages, etc.)
• Your site is interactive: you can communicate directly with visitors via a number of different channels
• Your site is adaptable: you can respond quickly to market changes
• Your site is flexible: you can easily test and change your web site design, layout, colours, features, etc.
• Your site is scalable – you can grow and expand as required (e.g. add e-commerce or mobile features) without incurring significant costs.

Many small businesses often end up being held “hostage” by their website developers. They end up being a passenger or, at the very best, a “backseat driver” in their own vehicle.

A WordPress powered site can help to eliminate some of the major costs of taking your business online and put you back in the driver’s seat.

The WordPress content publishing platform allows you to set up a very powerful, flexible and easy-to-use web presence that does not depend on how the site looks to work for you online. It’s easier to think of WordPress as having separate parts that work together seamlessly, but can be independently controlled. For example:

1. The part of WordPress that controls how you manage your site’s content is called the Content Management System (CMS),
2. The part that controls and extends the functionality of your site through a number of additional features is called the “plugins” section.
3. The part that controls the layout of your navigation menus (e.g. side bar menus, footer, etc.) is in a section called “widgets”.
4.  The part of your site that controls how your site looks (called a “theme”), allows you to quickly and easily change the entire look of your site as often as you like, without disturbing the site’s content and layout settings.

WordPress keeps all of the above parts separate. This allows you to set up a highly flexible, interactive, adaptable, scalable and easy-to-use site where you can focus on getting your online presence to work first before you commit serious money to making your site look the way you want it to look.

Why is this important? Well, consider this for a moment …

What if, after spending thousands of dollars on getting a static website built, you do some marketing tests and discover that your current web site layout is affecting your sales conversions? Let’s say, for example, that your site header is taking up too much valuable space in the visible part of your screen, the links your site visitors click on the most are too far down on your site, the navigation menu is on the wrong side of the page, and the “contact form” section on the menu should appear above the “newsletter” sign up form instead of below it.

If you own a web site built using a traditional web editor (e.g. Dreamweaver), then making the above changes requires that you either:

1. know how to use a web editor program and/or make changes to web code, or
2. pay someone to make those changes for you.

With WordPress, you would simply log into your administration area and, after clicking a couple of buttons to select a new theme or edit an existing one, and moving one or two elements called “widgets” around using a “drag and drop” method, you would have your site looking and working exactly the way you want it … all without ever touching any web code or requiring the services of a web designer.

A WordPress-powered site lets you have the keys and take your business wherever you want.

Let’s continue exploring the topic of how to give your site a professional image without investing a lot of money upfront in web design, but this time let’s take a different approach

Web Design – Our Suggested Approach To Saving Time And Money

As I mentioned earlier, we are not anti-web designers, we are pro business empowerment. We believe that how a web site looks is important and that you should have a professional looking site for your business, but we recommend not spending money on web design first, until you know what works for your business online and you can integrate the functional aspects of your site with the aesthetical ones.

The WordPress platform allows you to take your time and plan how to grow your business online cost-effectively without having to take your site offline.

Our suggested approach to saving time and money on web design, is as follows:

1. Start with a WordPress site if you have no online presence yet. Use a default theme that works for you and your business. As you will see in the section below, there are thousands of great looking professional themes you can use for FREE.
2. Focus on the functional aspects of your site, such as getting traffic, testing different elements of your site to try and improve your lead or sales conversion and monitoring visitor behaviour on your site to get a better understanding of what your visitors want and what works best online for your business.
3. Once you have a clear understanding of what works for your business online, you will know whether or not you should continue using your WordPress-driven site as a powerful web marketing tool (if it’s working why change?), or if your business model really needs something completely different, like a custom application built using a different platform.

If your business works just fine with your existing WordPress site, you can then either find, buy or get a web designer to customize or build for you a WordPress theme that suits both your aesthetic and functional needs, then simply upload it to your site and replace the old theme.

And if you decide that you really need to invest money in custom development for your business to give you the results you want, then you can rest assured that you have not wasted any time and effort by starting out with a WordPress site. All of your data is stored in a MySQL database, so your web development team should be able to take all of your site’s existing data and migrate it to your new web platform.

This is a sensible, practical and cost-effective strategy for getting a site that you can drive and that will perform exactly as it should for your business.

WordPress Themes – The Best Way To Save Money On Web Design

WordPress users benefit from the efforts of a growing community of talented and professional web designers by having access to thousands of FREE professional themes that you can use for your site as is, or easily customize to match the look and feel of your business.

As more and more businesses turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their content online, more designers are now focusing on creating themes for a wider audience of website owners. These themes can range from simple, stylish and professional looking, to visually stunning, highly creative and totally unique designs.

You simply choose or buy a ready-made theme, upload it to your site and “activate” it. This instantly changes the entire look and feel of your site.

Website Or Blog?

The distinction between “websites” and “blogs” are blurring more and more each day. Soon, even experienced web users won’t be able to distinguish between sites created using traditional website building applications and WordPress. In fact, given that tens of millions of people currently use WordPress to publish their content online, many of the sites you are visiting online right now have probably been built and are powered by WordPress.

(slide from “Blog Vs Website: Which Is Better For Your Business?” Seminars)

WordPress Themes – Useful Resources

If you just want to get your online business presence up and running quickly, choose one of the many freely available WordPress themes. Many of these will look fine once you change the colours and add your logo and graphic banners, all of which are fairly easy to do.

Alternatively, if you can’t find a free WordPress theme that you’re happy with to help you get started, you can choose a “Premium” WordPress theme that can be easily customized to suit your taste. Premium WordPress themes cost money, but we’re talking here about tens of dollars only, not thousands of dollars.

To view a range of high quality professional WordPress themes you can choose for your business site (both FREE and Premium) with links to explore these further, visit this page: WordPress Themes

Need Help With Getting A WordPress Blog Set Up For Your Business?

If you need help with WordPress installation or blog management, we can help.

We can install and set up a professional WordPress site for you that integrates powerful and functional web marketing elements into your online presence, using a highly flexible default theme that can be easily customized to match the look of your business.

We also provide a unique installation service that includes powerful analytics reporting, a range of functional business features, and a built-in traffic getting system (you simply publish your content and our system goes to work in the background, instantly notifying search engines, social networking sites, and a number of traffic generating sites and directories).

Finally, we provide our clients with training tutorials, regular performance reviews of their site and strategic advice, such as assistance in selecting a suitable WordPress theme or moving to a different platform.

By the time you are ready to invest in web design, you will be able to make a better and more inf ormed decision.

Please contact us if you would like more information on ways we can assist you to grow your business online. Alternatively, if you are located in the Sydney region (Australia), why not attend one of our FREE business seminars?

Related posts:

1. Why Use A WordPress Blog