Why WordPress? 10 Reasons

WordPress is an open source program, which means it is developed as a public collaboration; thousands (if not millions) of programmers and end-users like you and me contribute to the creation, maintenance and improvements of the program. This allows WordPress platform to constantly grow and improve along with changing technologies.

Sell your products, show your portfolio, have a video blog, promote your restaurant, publicize your events, create an online forum for your non-profit or business organization. Integrate social media, promote it all with email campaigns, and you’ve got a marketing tool that will expand as your business grows. It’s a piece of cake honey, and Girl Friday LOVES cake!

You can manage your WordPress site yourself with the Dashboard, which you an access from any computer or even an iPad that’s connected to the interwebs: add pages, upload content, refresh your shopping cart product list, blog about your Daily Specials…oh brother, the list is endless what you can do with WordPress.

The only limit: your imagination. And we know you’re not lacking that because you’ve decided to tackle the challenge of running a business, or taking charge of your marketing.  You can do it!!  Girl Friday knows you CAN….so get busy, get WordPress and get going on growing your business!!

woo hoo!!

ps: nope, Girl Friday does not “work” for WordPress. She’s just a big ole fan, that’s all.

I’m not kidding, WordPress is so easy even a baby can learn to manage, maintain and expand his own site! Well…maybe not an actual baby, but you know what I mean.

The administration area (the Dashboard, it’s called) is very user-friendly and is a cinch to navigate. Girl Friday had a recent client who just seemed to disappear after we designed his blog/site and provided him with a simple set of instructions and two training sessions (via phone). Do you know we didn’t hear a peep from him for weeks?! I started to get a little worried about not hearing from him, so finally one day I went to check his site and would you believe it? He had added all these new pages, uploaded photos, changed prices and content on his (very simple) product page all by himself…without even having to call me!

You don’t have to write a lot of content on your blog posts….just be consistent, and provide relevant information. For example, you could post your Daily Specials or your weekly breakfast menu on your blog, every day, or once a week, and that alone would bring your restaurant website a lot of organic search-engine goodness in just a short time.

Updating your product offering? Adding new artwork to your WordPress portfolio? It’s as easy as creating a Post and clicking “Publish.” Pretty soon you’re just a postin’ fool and a WordPress devotee…

Got a question? Why don’t you send Girl Friday an email then and just ask!! Now pardon me while I go teach my two year old niece how to post her favorite Princess Cakes videos on her blog!

WordPress makes it SO easy to optimize your site for SEO it’s just crazy, and I like that! Without going into a lot of the technical details, I can tell you that there are literally hundreds of tools that you can add to your WordPress backend that make Search Engine Optimization almost automatic.

The most important thing to remember is that the search engines don’t see your pretty pictures or your music or your videos…they see words. So your content is KEY.

Search Engine Optimization is a huge subject and Girl Friday is no expert, believe it, honey! But we do know how to utilize the WordPress concepts and tools that make SEO much easier for entrepreneurs or small businesses …not to mention much less costly!! So we’ll list just a very few of those SEO ideas for you here. As always, feel free to email if you have questions or want to explore further!

Work with WordPress to increase traffic to your site by incorporating some simple concepts:

• Relevant content that is: informative, entertaining, educational, explanatory, fun or funny, unique, engaging…you get the picture. There are millions of blogs, and billions of websites. The more unique you are the better your chances of being seen by the search engines.
• Write your content with the people who are searching for you in mind. What are the keywords they should type into Google when looking for you?
• Write your Page titles, Post titles, Links, Images, Alt Text, etc. with those same keywords in mind. Same goes for Title Tags and Headings within your content.
• Link building: WordPress has Blogroll links, Pingback and Trackbacks built in. Use them to link to other sites which then will link back to you.
• Plug-ins that add SEO functionality to your WordPress site: there are thousands. Girl Friday thinks the best source on the internet for all things SEO are at Yoast. Check out his site and sign up for his email blasts. You’ll be glad you did!
• Social Media: Google produces Facebook posts now for search results. Your WordPress site can very easily be connected to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This connection can yield more traffic to your site, more email sign-ups, more comments on your site…more social interaction.

There’s much more…but suffice it to say, if you’re using WordPress you’re already way ahead in the SEO game!! Now go out there and conquer the world!

For the most cost-efficient way to raise your site in organic search results, and to make your website a mean, lean WordPress marketing machine, adding a WordPress blog to the site is a no-brainer, baby.

WordPress started out as a blog platform. It has rapidly evolved into an excellent marketing tool for websites and Content Management System sites.

Thousands of plug-ins and widgets make your WordPress blog much more than a repository for your brilliant intellect and witty insights. Your blog can very easily become super-charged with video, music, photo galleries, interactive calendars, forums, testimonials…all very easy to install and maintain.

Getting your readers to engage in your blog is the key to raising its visibility in the search engines. By using WordPress plug-ins to make your content much more reader-active by entertaining them with videos or challenging them with surveys or forums, you’ll increase traffic to your posts and your site. If you’re using your blog to increase traffic to your business website, to gain more customers or increase new business, WordPress is not only the solution for the blog part of your site, it also beautifully manages your other content like products and shopping carts. More on that in later posts of “Why WordPress?”

IN the meantime, read the 2011 Top Ten Reviews, which places WordPress at number one over nine other blog programs.

Got a question? Need more info? Contact Girl Friday!

With a static site (HTML), you need to know HTML code, CSS, Flash, PHP, Cold Fusion….just looking at the names of those code languages gets Girl Friday all cross-eyed! Imagine having to search through a page of code, find the relevant string, then changing it, re-uploading it, on and on and on….just so you could update your website content. What a hassle and honey who needs more hassle?

WordPress has a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) content editor that eliminates the need for you to know any code at all in order change text, add photos, music, video and a host of other nifty things to your website. If you can use the menu and formatting palettes in any word processor, you can use WordPress.

So that’s that!! Know code? NO? No problem. Now remember that, dearie, and allow that thought to brighten your day!!

One thing Girl Friday just LOVES about WordPress (among the hundreds of other things she loves about WordPress) is that the design and layout aspect are built upon Themes. Themes are sort of like a template structure, but in WordPress they are waaaaaay better because you can customize Themes using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Style Managers, or even better: you can create your own Themes.

The use of Themes means that customization and creation of unique site designs is very flexible and only limited by your creativity. AND…if you change your mind (as Girl Friday does, often, you just better believe that!) it’s very quick and easy to switch between different Themes that you have customized or created, and have stored in the admin (Dashboard) area of your site.

Think of the WordPress theme structure as a giant walk-in closet. Go on in there honey, and go to town choosing different Themes, “accessorizing” them with different background colors, graphic elements, plugins, etc., and then trying them on for size by applying them to your WordPress site. Live with the Theme for a while. Does it fit the goal of your site? Is it functional yet visually compelling? If yes, then keep that Theme and wear it with pride, you gorgeous thing, you! If it’s just not working for you, or you’ve simply changed your mind…well guess what? it’s your prerogative sweetie, you just go ahead and pick out another Theme, or re-”accessorize” the current Theme, and try that one on for size!

This is just SO nifty, and really, what you’re looking for, right? You need to save money anywhere you can, and Girl Friday understands that honey, believe-you-me!! It’s just another reason I Looooooooove WordPress!! So: when you have a WordPress website, you’re in control of website costs…not a designer, not an IT guy. No longer will you need to pay designer fees in order to make simple changes to your site; even design and layout changes can be handled by you or an administrator. You won’t have to keep track of software updating, uploads or maintenance because WordPress has automatic upgrade notification for its software AND for any plug-ins you’ve installed. You won’t have to pay an expensive SEO company because with WordPress’s built-in SEO and some excellent (FREE) plug-ins, all you have to do when you create a new Post or Page is activate a few SEO functions with just a wee click o’ the mouse. It’s peachy, I tell ya! Now…go out there and show that smile.

WordPress has literally thousands of plug-ins….not hundreds. Thousands. WHAT’S a plug-in, you ask? Well, each plug-in is a unique little set of instructions that add beauty and fun and functionality and music and video and art galleries and OH pretty much whatever you can imagine to your WordPress site. Plug-ins do gorgeous things, as I just mentioned, and they also do very important, code-based maintenance, SEO, updating and blahblahblah BOR-ing stuff, too (important and necessary functions that make WordPress SO freakin’ cool!)

It’s like an ever-changing, constantly updated snowfall of plug-in snowflakes! Well, maybe not quite that lovely, but still…I love them!

The best part about the majority of plug-ins is that they are FREE in most cases. So, you can have a super-duper neato-keen WOW WordPress site with a Slideshow of your amazing photos, a Gallery of your wonderful Art, a Playlist of your Music, a Blog with Videos, an Event Calendar…name it, and G-Friday will embark on a cyber journey of epic proportions to search for, download, upload, activate and set your cool plug-ins on your awesome WordPress site cause THAT’S what G-Friday does!!

WordPress is BFF with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn! They’re not just friendly, they’re like, practically married to each other!

Here’s how your BFF Girl Friday sees it: your WordPress site is the center of your marketing efforts…it’s the center of the daisy, the jelly in the donut, the Malcom in the Middle…you get the picture. And Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even (outbound) Email Campaigns, which can now be integrated with your social media tools, are the pathways that lead new visitors and clients to that website.

There are literally hundreds of WordPress plugins that are designed especially for using social media tools to flow visitors to your site. And remember: your site is your Home…your social media is the road leading to your Home! Sort of like the Yellow Brick Road leading to Oz, or the …well, again, you get the picture! more

And ANOTHER thing I love about WordPress…is the WordPress community.

Now, just who are we talking about here? Well, let’s start with the WordPress developers themselves. These fall into two main camps: WordPress.org, where you can go and download WP for free and create your website/URL that you host yourself, and WordPress.com, where they will host a WordPress site for you (if you do not have your own URL). more