Managing Your Own Website: “Look Ma, No Hands!”

Getting a website for your business is one thing. Maintaining it by adding new content, promoting it, and using it to really support your business is another.

Today, in order to really have your website be ranked by Google and other search engines it needs to be updated frequently (on a weekly basis or more). It also needs to be optimized for search engines – a whole different story. Your site also likely needs to be worked on by someone who isn’t super technology savvy  — e.g. yourself — or a small team of people. It needs to look friendly, present your image, the list goes on. This is challenging for the average small business to do.

So, let make it simple: instead of getting a static website, a shingle on the web, consider using a Blog or Content Management System that you can maintain yourself.

Static Websites

Let’s start with the basics. Back in the day (and I am talking the 1990s) it used to be enough just to have a static web site. A static website is a collection of web pages that describe your businesses, products, services, etc. There are a bunch of companies that still offer them: $500 for five pages, hosted for a year, for example. The pages were changed relatively infrequently, there was typically one person who managed and maintained the site, and that was … that.

The challenge with a static website is that if you either add information content to your site frequently, or you have more than one person adding information to your site, coordinating all of the details becomes a nightmare! Even though there are tools like iWeb (for Macs) that I think are superb, static websites end up being unwieldy and painful to manage as you keep adding content. Further, when you try to tie into social networking, etc., the process becomes an utter disaster the eventually ends up with the site being left to gather dust.

Free ‘Blogs: A better alternative

So, how do you manage? Enter the Blogs (short for Web Log). Blogs started out as an easy way for people to share their thoughts, a stream of consciousness on some topic, decanted to the web. You can get a blog from Blogger — or a bunch of other places. Blogs quickly evolved into more sophisticated applications that allowed static pages as well as frequently updated articles or posts,  picture galleries, different menus and a whole bunch of other stuff — i.e. a full blown Content Management System.

The major benefit of a blog is that you can get one for free, they are super easy to set up and use, and they work — like magic. Free blogs are a great way to publish your thoughts, and to have people interact with them.  The downside of a (free) blog for a business is that you will ultimately need to change the layout or add some capability that turns into a giant pain, and you need to upgrade to a paid version or migrate to a different system altogether. Problematic.

Content Management Systems: Your best Choice

The easy solution to the preceding is to use a Content Managements System (or CMS) of your own. A CMS is essentially a sophisticated Blog that makes the whole process of authoring content and maintaining a website easy. CMSes keep track of details like “link consistency,” you can change the way they look with a couple of clicks, and you can integrate them with social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, etc., and help you automagically install software upgrades. The list goes on. Basically, CMSes offer a simple web browser based interface (like Yahoo or Goggle’s web mail) that you type stuff into and voila! you have a website that you are managing. It’s pretty much that easy.

There are a whole bunch of Content Management Systems to choose from. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are three of the more popular. Personally, I recommend WordPress for small business websites. It’s super easy to use and maintain without being too restrictive, and they even have a free hosted version as a bonus. I also really like Drupal for my own purposes. It’s very flexible, but for most small businesses WordPress is the way to go. I can’t comment too much on Joomla at the moment since I haven’t used it for quite a while.

What’s Best for your Business?

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you’re likely asking “So … what do I do?” The short answer is that if you want a website that you can evolve and use to drive your business, get yourself an installation of WordPress. If you want it to be advertisement free and on your own domain, you will need to pay for stuff, website hosting being one, some consulting to get the CMS installed and configured is another (if you don’t want to invest the time in figuring out how all of this stuff works).

The cost of all of this? Well, that’s another article!