As a small business owner, you are probably more focused on serving your customers more than the technology that powers your website. However, there will come a time in every entrepreneur’s journey when they will need to update their website and be able to maintain some aspects of it themselves. WordPress has become an excellent platform for small businesses so they can attract traffic, convert customers, and build a professional brand that consumers trust.
What should a small business look for in their content management system?
Who remembers saving HTML in Notepad and uploading them to a server via FTP? That was no fun, so there was a desire for a better way to create content and manage them. This gap is why content management systems have become a massive hit among publishers. While WordPress wasn’t the first, it has become one of the most extensible platforms on the web today for publishing content.
When thinking about a content system, there are a few requirements that small businesses should keep in mind for their website.
- Cost – The initial and on-going costs of operating this content management system
- Accessibility – The ability to access, modify, and maintain information for administrators and viewers
- Security – The ability to restrict information and resources only to those authorized and privileged to do so
- Marketplace – The ability to transact services and products from third-parties
- Community– The ability to discuss your ideas and experience with others
While these requirements seem insignificant at first, they become critical to the bottom line when you have a major marketing campaign or a new product launch. It’s not just about building your website that matters; it’s also about the ability to maintain your site and add new content whenever you need to that is valuable.
Of all the content management platforms out there, WordPress scores highly in all the requirements above. Not only is WordPress a great CMS, but it’s also a supportive community that will help your website become successful.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, powering more than one-third of websites on the internet. It enables people to express their ideas, businesses to communicate with customers, and organizations to spread the word about their activities with the world. WordPress is free, and you’re allowed to modify it just about any way you can imagine. All you need to use WordPress is hosting and hopefully a domain that’s all your own. And if you want to maximize your WordPress site to the fullest, add in a little elbow grease to make WordPress help you express yourself to the world.
WordPress can serve the needs of a basic website all the way up to the needs of a national newspaper without any hesitation. Small businesses usually share a need for a platform that can make publishing new content easy, extending the core capabilities with plugins, and the ability to generate leads and sales.
Beyond the capabilities of WordPress, using WordPress empowers the small business to support open-source software, independent developers, and designers. They are free to modify and use WordPress without any expectation of payments or royalties. The use of WordPress can help a small business spend less time tinkering in a hard-to-use interface and more time serving customers they love.
Managing your website with WordPress is easy. In fact, we recommend every business owner takes a few minutes to try it and rest assured that it’s not likely anything will break. For more advanced usage, we recommend exploring the use of WordPress concierge service to answer questions and receive guidance for maximizing your use of WordPress.
WordPress is ideal for small businesses
The number one reason why we love WordPress is that it adapts to a business’ changing needs relatively easily. As the business scales upward, a business owner can trust that their website can handle it, so long as they have decent hosting. If they are a product company one day, then a service company the next, WordPress can quickly support these needs. Secondly, the community of experts can’t go unstated — if you ever need a little extra help or a different way to solve a problem, someone is always there.
We recommend every business-oriented website publish information about their products, services, contact information, and industry-specific information. No matter the type of information you want to publish or how you monetize it, WordPress can solve for it. Every business, especially smaller ones, should consider a content strategy so they can compete in a world where consumers research their buying decisions well before they even pick up the phone. Content is the fuel that drives all other marketing, so a mature and proven content management system is vital to capitalizing on great content.
Check out the WordPress showcase to see examples of sites that are powered by WordPress out in the wild. Maybe you’ll even recognize a few of them.
