I’ve recently posted several times about the concept of bootstrapping your first online business or any business for that matter. I believe that bootstrapping is the only way you should go when starting your first business. I’m also a huge advocate of using WordPress in general, but particularly for those individuals looking to bootstrap their website design and development for a new business start-up. While it might not be the solution for everyone, WordPress certainly provides a viable alternative for aspiring web entrepreneurs who’d like to build a powerful, flexible, easy-to-use website at an affordable price. In fact, you can build a highly customized, feature rich WordPress site for less than $150.
Here are just a few of the reasons that WordPress is the ideal solution for bootstrapping the web design and development of your new business:
Easy Installation & Updates
Wordpress is one of the most flexible and powerful web content management systems available anywhere. WordPress is open source software and free to use for either personal or commercial purposes, making it vastly beneficial for any small business or start-up with limited resources.
WordPress is:
- Inexpensive (can’t get any cheaper)
- Simple to learn
- Easy to update
Installation is easy and simple, and you can literally, have your site up in minutes with their famous “5 Minute Wordpress Installation”. Hosting companies, such as Blue Host and Fat Cow, even offer so-called “one-click installations,” making the installation about as easy as it can get.
One of the greatest fears of running a website comes from individuals unfamiliar with HTML. With other CMS platforms and particularly for custom built websites, you’d need familiarity and knowledge about the platform the site is built on, which typically makes changing or adding existing content a scary proposition for the uninitiated.
One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is its user-friendliness for web publishing newbies: conceivably, you may never have to touch a single line of code. You won’t need to be an expert in HTML, PHP, CSS or any other web technology, freeing you up to focus on what’s most important – providing your visitors with great content. WordPress makes updating content on your website easy and painless for those unfamiliar with HTML. You won’t have to buy an expensive HTML editing tool like Dreamweaver and you won’t have to ask your webmaster every time you want to make minor changes or upload new articles on your website. Once installed, you just login to your WordPress administrative panel, and you can easily build new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor. Point, click, and type. That’s all there is to it with WordPress.
Built in SEO
WordPress is ready built for search engine spiders, which takes much of the pain out of building a search engine friendly website. WordPress code is lean and mean and its features and functionality help to guide the search engine spiders effortlessly through your site to allow for easy “indexing”, the process by which a search engine includes your site in its database. For the most part, search engines ignore the styles and the look and feel of your website, looking primarily for the keyword text or information, AKA “content”, on your website. Most search engines only scan roughly the first third of any given web page before moving on to scan the next web page. Most of the design templates for WordPress, called themes, are designed so that the content on the page is as close to the top of the page as possible, making it very easy for search engines to grab your most vital page content for indexing purposes. The rest of the coding on the pages, including items like the footers and sidebars, which are much less important for search engine indexing, is placed at the bottom of the pages.
“WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of search engine optimization (SEO),” Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer.
Community Support
WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, both open-source platforms, with a vast development community “ecosystem” dedicated to building themes, plug-ins and applications exclusively for WordPress sites. The WordPress development community’s massive, highly skilled programmers provide thorough documentation and support for the WordPress community at large. If you do run into any problems or issues, or if you require highly customized features, it’s easy to find support or assistance from the thousands of WordPress developers willing to help. In most instances, fixing bugs or problems is (usually) far easier and much simpler than other comparable content management systems. The bottom line is that the WordPress support community can help you to save a ton of time and money on installation, maintenance as well as future development.
Flexibility & Customization
In the past, WordPress has commonly been thought of as just a blogging tool. WordPress has evolved into a much more powerful web publishing platform over the years, providing flexibility and customization that is truly astonishing. WordPress pages are styled using CSS, a lightweight and highly efficient method for styling web pages. The WordPress community provides a vast array of highly customized themes which you can store and use with just a click of your mouse, giving you the ability to use a wide variety of different themes with totally different looks. Quite literally, you could have a different look and feel every day on your site if you wanted to with just a single click of the mouse without ever having to touch the actual content of your site.
Additionally, WordPress has a vast array of so-called “plugins” that can customize and improve your site’s performance even better than a standard WordPress installation. There are hundreds of plugins that can help to customize your site to your liking, easy to install and usually free of charge. Plugins provide a massive amount of leverage for site owners who want to customize their sites inexpensively.
Code Compliance
Using Wordpress ensures that your site will be XHTML compliant with the latest web standards. This helps to ensure that your site is compliant with accessibility and legal requirements right “out of the box”, allowing you to get on with running your business. WordPress has gone to great lengths to ensure that every line of their code is in full compliance with W3C standards. This is important to ensure browser compatibility with each of the current major web browsers but also maintains forward compatibility compliance with the next generation of software, tools and applications of WordPress.
Bottom Line
Using WordPress, the overall cost for any web development project will be FAR less than a “custom” website built from scratch. WordPress provides far more value than just a cheaper development platform, however. With WordPress, you’ll get a publishing platform that comes with easy installation and updates, advanced SEO features baked right into the software, a flexible and highly customizable functionality, a vast developer support community, and astounding functionality, usability and control over your website.
WordPress provides so much inherent value that it shouldn’t be free, but thankfully, it is.
Simply put, WordPress is worth it’s weight in gold.
Additional Resources on the Blogging Platforms:
- Blog Platforms of Choice Among the Top 100 Blogs
- Is WordPress the Best Blogging Platform?
- Weblog/Blog Software Tools
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i was wondering if u can tell me more about the bootstrapping. if i want to for u from home how and when and how much? and do u have to pay for it? can i write me back ASP.
As a web designer I think it is true that while starting a business bootstrapping is a great way. Thanks for sharing these information.
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