This is unquestionably the easiest question we get. The simple answer is “Yes!” Everyone who intends to have any form of Internet presence, whether it is selling on a small venue site or developing a huge e-commerce business, must have their own domain name if they really wish their business to be a success.
Having your own domain name lets you define your presence, offer more features, functions and services which remain under your direct control and, in fact, levels the playing field between you and your competitors — even the big ones! And, having your own domain name, will give you an edge over those who do not have one of their own.
WP Business Network will help you determine a good domain name for your business and help you understand the benefits, costs, and difficulties of having more than one domain name. If you wish, we can arrange to register your domain name(s) and manage them for you as well.
If you already have a domain name we can advise you on its suitability and help you get the most benefit from it. We suggest you talk to us before registering a domain name if you do not already have one.
The most likely answer to this question is “Yes” but it is not a certainty. Sure, there are websites of all shapes and sizes but some online businesses just do not need one. We will be glad to discuss this in detail with you on the inside.
Having a badly designed website can be ineffective and may actually be harmful for your business, so better none than the wrong one. There are a lot of factors to consider when deciding to have, or not to have, a business website. It is worth taking a little time to see that you are on the right track.
If you already have a website you may want to have us examine it to see how it stands up in the market place. There may well be simple changes that could improve your results dramatically. There may be changes that are necessary to prevent loss of business as well.
Feel free to contact us about this.
These are just three of many products and serices available to you in the website realm. It will not be too hard to determine which, if any, of these items, or others, you might need. In fact, you may be surprised to discover that WordPress can provide any of these functions and so many more. The advantage is you can start small and grow as needed.
• A template is used for creating online listings at various venue sites or to produce a structure or layout for a page on many website platforms.
• A simple web page, often called a “landing page” is perhaps the most basic way to begin a presence on the Internet.
• Next comes a long-form, single page, website. There are issues to consider with this one so do not just jump in without first understanding them.
• A full multi-page website is a big undertaking and commitment but it can be the foundation to your online presence. It can support and basic information site or a solid e-commerce business.
Your actual business ideas and goals, and the speed at which you want to reach them, will be the basis for determining which of these and/or other products and services you may need. The good news is, WordPress pretty much has you covered no matter which you choose at the beginning and no matter how big you intend to grow.
There is much more to a well designed website than pretty graphics. There is much more to your success on the Internet than a simple listing template or basic one-page website. While WP Business Network is not a web design company, our owners have been designing websites since you could still count the entire number of websites on the Internet.
Steve, one of our owners, created his first website just a few months after the World Wide Web, the foundation of all websites, came into existence. Together, we have built several thousand websites for our clients and our own use. When providing guidance inside WP Business Network, we consider all aspects of your business, whether it be large or small.
We can discuss your ideas, help you examine your needs, and help develop an action plan to reach your goals. We can direct you to a full solution web service provider, and show how WordPress can handle your needs. Or, maybe you just want to do it yourself with what you will learn here.
We are, frankly, amazed at how many pretty listing templates, landing pages, and one page websites, are purchased every day by online business owners who really want to improve their business but who end up being just one more data point lost in the pack.
Most of these templates, pages, and websites, do nothing at all for identity or branding and often the designer unintentionally harms your prospects of improving your business. The designer’s singular skill in graphic design or HTML coding, or simply assembling themes and plugins, may produce a pleasing look but ignores key design elements that affect things like dwell time and, ultimately, sales conversions.
These important elements are overlooked and, in fact, are often unknown to the designer. Even a WordPress website cannot fully compensate for incompetent website design. A good designer not only knows about these elements and incorporates them into your design, but discusses your goals and develops a solution that addresses your needs.
Just remember, a good website is more than just pretty!
There are many answers to this question, but first let me say, “You do not have to use WordPress. There are many other choices available.” That said, let me get into just a few of the reasons you should probably take a serious look at WordPress for building your blog or website.
• First of all we should consider the astounding market share WordPress commands. WordPress is a modern database-driven platform known as a Content Management System (CMS). As of July, 2022, there are about 80 or so top CMS platforms being tracked. WordPress is used for about 65% of all CMS websites. When considering all websites on the net, including legacy sites created long before WordPress was even a concept, WordPress accounts for about 35%.
• Next, WordPress has been around since starting out as a basic blogging site back in May, 2003. It quickly grew into a full-fledged website and has been growing ever since. Managed by a large development team and released as open source code package, WordPress is secure and stable. This cannot be said about many competing platforms.
• WordPress is optimized for search engines. Out of the box it is a great choice for SEO. Other standard SEO elements like content, keywords, and backlinks can be readily developed by the site owner with a minimum of knowledge.
• As mentioned above, there is a very large community of users and developers. If you want to do something with your website there is probably an existing way to do it. If not, there are countless developers who can make it happen for you. This is simply not possible with most other platforms.
• WordPress is easy to learn and use making it great for small businesses information sites, ecommerce applications, membership sites, and more.
• And while the above is true, the very same WordPress can grow and scale to be the core of a major enterprise level site. There is almost nothing WordPress cannot do. From millions of small business and blogging sites, to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sites. WordPress is used by these people and companies you might know: Bi-Rite Market, Glad, Adobe Blogs, Childrens Radio Foundation, Tonal, Hodge Bank, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Daybraker, Capgemini, Global News, The Obama Foundation, Angry Birds, The Walt Disney Company, Boston Market, Canada.com, WNBA, The Nation, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Toyota Motors, Alanis Morissette, MIT, Dassault Aviation, SirusXM Canada, Kaiser Family Foundation, New York Post, Time.com, Facebook Newsroom, Sony Music, Sweden’s Official Site, Georgia State University, LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, US Air Force General Chuck Yeager, William Shatner, Gateway Bank, Stephen B. Henry, and countless others.
If you are not using WordPress for your website platform you need to ask yourself, “why not?”
Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia, defines it in this way: Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.
The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown dramatically since the wide introduction of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, including things such as electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction’s lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies, such as e-mail, as well.
A small percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce eventually involves physical items and their transportation in at least some way.
E-commerce, or electronic commerce, is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business.
Basically, if you are a business with an online presence and you provide products or services as a result of contacts made online, then you are involved in e-commerce.
An e-commerce website is just a website designed to support making online transactions, exchanging goods and services for currency. Typically this will have a method of displaying products or services, displaying price and other relevant information, and often a way of transacting sales, such as a checkout or shopping cart process.
Whether or not you will need one for your business can depend on many factors but is generally based on your desire to actually make sales directly to people through your Internet presence. There are many different ecommerce solutions, and we often refer members to specific 3rd-party venues, platforms, or other e-commerce entities as part of a complete WordPress-based business solution.
Content, as it relates to a WordPress website, usually means the text or information, images, audios, videos, etc., displayed on a website or other web page or template. This also includes blog posts. Any WordPress solution will rely on the site owner to provide content, or to hire the development of content for the website. Content will be specific to the needs and purpose of the site for which it is created.
Content typically includes photographic images and even off-site links and may include other graphic formats as well. The information you are reading at this moment is content for this website.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the process of making a website more suitable for search engines to rate and indexing. The better the site, SEO speaking, the better it will do in search engine result pages (SERPs) and a good return there is one of the key elements of being found on the Internet.
Let us consider one of Steve’s regular monthly SEO clients: Teen Stars Forever Pinups. You can find them at https://teenstarsforeverpinups.com/. Their site is a shop for teen actor, child star, and popular teen musician, singer, and other performer, magazine pinups and photographs.
Google is the largest and most used search engine on the Internet. If you do a Google search for the term teen pinups, a very generic term for what my client sells, you will receive more than 1 million, 800 thousand returns. These will be displayed to you at 10 returns to the page, or more than one hundred and eighty thousand pages.
Most people will not look more than about 5 pages or so to see the sites that have been returned in the search. Many will not go beyond the first page. Therefore if you are on page 45 or 253 or 32,427 your website is not likely to ever be found. The key is to be somewhere in the top few pages.
Teen Stars Forever Pinups, however, typically shows up in the top position on page one despite the huge number of returns. That is not too shabby at all. But the site also shows up in several other spots on page one, which blocks additional competitors from being seen there. That is the result of two important things:
1) a WordPress website, and
2) good SEO practices.
Being on page one, if at all possible, is important. As many as 95% of all searches end with one or more choices from page one. Some 67% make their choices from only the first 5 spots. This leaves only 5% for all the remaining pages starting with page two.
Where is your website in the search results? Another good reason to be using WordPress!
