The Basics

WordPress is a Content Management System. It’s an application that sits on your web server and manages all of the pages, images, links, blog posts, photo albums, and everything else that go into making your web site. Instead of simply having HTML pages with Javascript and CSS that load pictures, WordPress breaks your website up into three functional areas or layers that make it easier to maintain by adding content and to modify by changing the look, feel, and functionality.

WordPress Layers:

* Data stores, which contain all of the content on your site (images, pages, etc.,) and are a combination of the file system (hard disks) of the server on which WordPress is running, a MySQL database, and n some cases other web servers
* Business logic that is program “instructions” that make up the actual WordPress application
* Display logic that controls what you see displayed in Firefox, Internet Explorer, or whatever web browser you use

Business logic, by the way is the glue that ties the data stores and display logic together in a meaningful way so that you actually have a website. It’s helpful to know the preceding is because it will eventually enable you to better manage your website — using plugins, widgets, and themes! Yipee!!!

Plugins: Optional WordPress Extensions

So then, what is a WordPress plugin? Simply put, a WordPress plugin optionally extends the functionality of the WordPress application in some way. It is enables WordPress to work slightly differently.  To use an analogy, think of WordPress plugins as being like optional accessories on your car — like a CD changer instead of a radio, or maybe maybe 4 wheel drive and a towing package. It changes the basic car in some way. That’s it.

There are literally a bazillion plugins that extend WordPress in all kinds of useful ways. For example, if you want to integrate your blog with FaceBook, there are several plugins for that. If you want to optimize your blog for search-engines, there are several plugins for that. Let’s say you want to add an image gallery (you guessed it!), there are several plugins for that. The list of plugins is literally endless (there are new plugins created daily), and what you can accomplish with them is pretty amazing.

If plugins extend WordPress, Themes and Widget are the other side of the coin — they personalize it.

Themes Personalize WordPress

Themes control the way your site is displayed. They are the display logic that WordPress uses. So, for example, the look and feel of this site, the two-column layout, the fonts, font sizes and colours, the way the menus and navigation are set up, and and pretty much everything that you see right now is all controlled by a theme. To use an analogy, think of a theme as being an outfit, a suit of clothing. You could have a casual outfit that’s a pair of  jeans and a t-shirt, or perhaps a business suit — it all depends on the image you want to project. Once of the nice things about WordPress is that since all of your sites content in saved in a data store, changing the look and feel of you site is a snap! Pick a new theme.

Themes themselves are composed of page templates — think of it as a different shirt or pants that go with an outfit. Templates subtly alter a “look” or in this case page layout. Templates determine the way your page is arranged: one, two, three or more columns, the types of pages (e.g. blog, slide show, etc.), which side of the page the columns is located, font, font sizes, colours, images, the list goes on.

Some themes are pretty simple. What you see is pretty much what you get. There isn’t much that you can do with them. Other themes are actually much more complex — they are actually frameworks that you can use to build your own theme with your own page templates, etc. Pretty slick, but this can become very challenging very quickly for a novice.

Widgets to Accessorize Themes

Widgets are theme independent accessories that enhance your theme: a calendar showing your blog posts, a Tag Cloud, or customizable text box into which you can load other stuff. Think of widgets being as earrings or a tie that finish off your outfit — bling for your theme, in other words. That’s it.

Putting It All Together

WordPress is incredibly easy for novices to use and maintain, hence it’s popularity. If you are a novice or are not very tech savvy and are contemplating installing and configuring your own WordPress site expect it to take some time. There is a learning curve, and it helps to understand the way WordPress is organized: data store vs. actual application vs. display. Understanding this the basic organization will help you isolate the elements that you need to change in order to take a basic WordPress site, and make it you very own, just the way you want it.

If all of this is very confusing, check out my article on Managing Your Own Website for more of an introduction.

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!

The Giant Marketplace Analogy

Think of the Internet as a GIANT marketplace, a mall in which you plan to browse around, shop for stuff, and perhaps even buy things. Your window onto this marketplace is a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari that runs on your computer. Powering up your computer and launching your web browser initiates the magic.

So let’s say you want to heard about this neat love story called “Romeo and Juliet,” and you’d like to know more about it. You power on your computer, launch your web-browser, get the Google splash screen, type in “Romeo and Juliet,” and hit enter. What goes on here?

Back to the marketplace analogy: in geek-speak, your the web browser on your computer is a client. Just like clients or customers at a mall in the real world, it’s has a requirement and asks behind the information counter (Google) at the mall for information about Romeo and Juliet. What happened when you launched your web browser (a client application) was it connected to Google’s site a server based web application (web server for short) — and made a request for information related to Romeo and Juliet. Google’s web server then came back with a response, a list of other web servers that had information about Romeo and Juliet.

Understanding the concept of clients, servers (or service providers), and request-response are fundamental to understanding the internet.

Clients, and Servers, and Applications — Oh My!

The internet consists of a bunch of computers all connected together in a network. Some computers, like the one on which you are reading this article are clients. Other computers, like the computer on which this article is actually located are servers. Clients (like your PC, Mac, Smart Phone, etc) run client-based applications (like Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers, or MS Outlook and Thunderbird for email). Servers run server applications like the Apache Web Server, Email Servers, e-commerce applications, etc. Whew!

A single server-computer can run one or more server applications, just like your PC/Mac/SmarPhone can run several applications. For example, you can run a web browser, Microsoft Word, and Skype, on yout PC/Mac/SmartPhone. Same with servers. A server that runs an email application is called a Mail server, an so on. If you are still with me, you’re rapidly becoming proficient in geek speak.

Protocols: Say What?

The client and client applications interact with servers and server applications using communication protocols. Remember the request-response we discussed earlier? That’s a communication protocol, or protocol for short. Protocols are the very structured forms of communication that allow clients and servers to interact.  Each type of activity you perform related to the internet typically has a protocol associated with it. Let’s look at this in more detail.

The first thing you need to do to use an internet application like the web, for example, is to attach your client (PC, Mac, etc) a network (Comcast, Verizon, etc.). The protocol that you’d use to attach could be either Ethernet if you use router or ADSL modem, WiFi (if you have wireless), 3G (if you have a smart phone. Once attached to a network, you need to actually connect to the Internet. The protocol used for that is typically TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol). There are a couple more details here, but they just make thins REALLY confusing.

Once connected to the Internet, the client applications on your computer can connect to server applications using their own protocols like HyperText Transefer Protocol (http for short) for web access or POP3 (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) for email.  on the internet to start weaving the magic that you’d like to have happen.

Why You Care

The reason it’s useful to have at least a basic understanding of the preceding is that it will help you get the most out of your investment in a website, email, etc.,  and will eventually help you promote your business on the internet. The other day I chatted with a nice lady who wanted me to build a website for her. She was very confused by some of the things that she could do — like manage and maintain her website from any computer (pretty much) on the Internet, and do so without special and expensive tools or training. Knowing how this stuff works sort of will help you ask the right questions, and in many instances find answers to problems you encounter.

NOTE: As a business, it’s important not to buy more than you need in anticipation of clients that aren’t there — if a bicycle will work for a while, don’t buy a Mercedes. On the other hand, don’t limit your business growth by under investing and locking yourself into an application that limits you and creates a high switching cost later.

For most businesses, the correct answer is to get a set up a website based on a content management system — WordPress is ideal for most users — that will allow one or more people in the business to maintain the website. Further, most major web hosting providers offer a facility to quickly and easily install this application. The challenge for most small buisinesses, however, is getting the system configured and optimized to get a high search engine ranking, etc.

The Bicycle: Getting your business online for free
Google offers the least expensive options for getting online with a combination of Goggle Sites, Blogger, and Gmail. If you just want a blogging site, there are options www.wordpress.com. These solutions are simple, user friendly, and is something that anyone who has used Google or Yahoo Mail can set up.

The benefits of free sites are that it costs you absolutely nothing to get started. Just sign up for the services you want, and you are ready to go in minutes.

The drawbacks with using free sites are:

• You don’t have the branding that you get from having your own domain
• You are limited to the display templates that are are provided
• You are limited in some of the optimization that you can do to improve your sites search engine rank — the lower you rank the less likely people are to find it

The Scooter: Getting your business online for $10/year
Yes, you can get your business online for around $10/year with a custom domain name. The $10 is the fee for registering your domain name. I like www.godaddy.com as a domain name registrar. They’re inexpensive, and offer a great user interface for configuring DNS (Directory Name Service) which is a vital but little understood aspect of aspect of establishing a presence online.

Once you have registered your domain name, you can set up your mail, website, file sharing, and calendars for your business with the free, Standard Edition of Google Apps.

The benefits of using the Google Apps Standard Edition are:

• It costs you about $10 to get your own personal domain depending on the registrar you choose.
• Your data is secure, backed up, and available 99.9% of the time
• You get additional intranet collaboration tools that you can use for your business — like calendars and web sites that only your employees/authorized users can see

The drawbacks with using Google Apps Standard Edition are:

• You are limited to the display templates that are are provided (though they are pretty customizable!)
• You are limited in some of the optimization that you can make to improve your sites search engine rank — the lower you rank the less likely people are to find it
• There are few “bells and whistles” you can add to to attract people to your business

Once you’ve signed up and configured your Domain Name Services (DNS) with GoDaddy or other registrar you can be up and running as fast as you can configure and load the system.

The Car: Getting your business online for around $10/Month
At this point, you’re likely asking yourself why you would want to pay up to $10/month to have your business online if you could get the same functionality for free. The fact is that it’s not the same functionality. What the additional expense gets you is more control over how your content is displayed, the look and feel of your site, options for optimizing your site for search engines, etc.

The trade-off here appears to be choosing between building and maintaining your own website site and getting a “canned,” pre-built solution. This is somewhat true. Larger web hosting service providers offer tools to install popular website applications such as WordPress — which I strongly recommend for most small business websites in most cases.

I keep getting approached by people with great business ideas. Some of the ideas have great potential. Some ideas, not so much…. How do *you* tell the difference?  Having been in the tech industry during the dotcom bubble, here are some basic questions I have learned to ask before investing time or money:

• WHAT products or services do you want to sell, what problem are you solving?
• WHO are your customers?
• WHY should they buy from you — i.e. what’s your *unique* value to them?
• HOW MUCH will it cost them to buy, and how much does it cost you to produce?
• WHERE can they purchase the product or service?

These are pretty basic questions, but if you start answering them in detail, you’ll be surprised at what you learn. The trick is once you have answered one of the questions, evaluate your answer in relation to the other question to see if your answer is still true. Answering the questions also frames the thing most people fear: the DREADED “Business Plan.”

Let’s dig down a bit. Let’s say, for example, you have a dog who keeps getting into your garbage. The annoyance of cleaning up made you think about a design for a new type of garbage can that’s dog resistant. So when you think about the “WHAT” you are selling is a dog (or even animal, since it works for cats and raccoons as well) resistant garbage can. A similar thing is true if you have a service business. Cool! We have a start.

The next question is “WHO” are you selling to? In this case, your customers will likely be pet owners or people who live where there are raccoon, possums, etc. If you were just selling plain old garbage cans, your customers would be different, though anyone who buys a garbage can might want what you have developed. Which leads to the next question: “WHY?”

So “WHY” whould people want to buy your dog or animal resistant garbage can? What problem do you solve? In this instance, it saves your customers time by avoiding having to clean up messes, and it also saves money. Saves money?!? Yup. Depending on what garbage your dog ate, it may need to go to a veterinarian — which costs money.  So the thing that differentiates your garbage can from others is that it saves people time and money – and that’s the reason they should buy it!

Hmmm. Saves time and money — how much should you charge for this? There are a couple of ways of looking at this: cost based pricing and value based pricing. Note that there are other ways of slicing this problem, and this could be a whole book in itself.

• Cost based pricing: look at your production, operating, sales and marketing cost, add a some profit, and mark your product up to reflect that price.
• Value based pricing: asks the question what is the value of this product to the customer? If you have to take your dog to the vet once a week on average because your dog got into the garbage, that’s pretty expensive…. So how much would someone pay to avoid that cost? Answering this question requires some market research — which can be as simple as calling up a bunch of friends, etc., and asking them.

If you are still with me, this gets to the last question. Where can will your customers be able to buy your products. Given this is a garbage can that’s pet proof, there are a couple of options — generally referred to as sales channels. There are essentially three channels you can use:

• Direct: Where you have a store and/or sales people and you sell directly to your customers
• Indirect: Where you sell through a resller or wholesaler, or some such
• Web: which is really a variation of direct sales but I decided to break it out since it has a different cost structure

In the case of our dog resistant garbage can, direct direct sales would be out of your own store. Indirect would be through places like Hardware stores or Pet Supply stores — so Home Depot or Petco, for example. Web-based sales, off course, would be off your website at www.dogsafegarbage.com, for example.

Now that you have sense for how to answer the basic question, it’s useful to go back to the very beginning and evaluate each of the answers against the others to ensure that your answers are consistent. So for example, could/would you be able to sell your product through Victoria’s Secret (the girly-gear store)? Not very likely.

If you’ve actually got this far, you might notice that you have a bunch of answers but you still have a lot of questions — like how much will your_favourite_retail_chain charge me to sell my product? This is great! These questions begin to give you the basis for your next majour step in a developing a sucessful business: the much dreaded business plan.

To make this process a little clearer, I’ve taken a closer look at how these questions might be answered for 3 different types of businesses in a different set of articles: a product, a service, and a web-based information business — and how to evolves this into a business plan.

Just starting a business? Trying to to launch a website for an existing business? You might be a little intimidated, not to mention overwhelmed by the options available to you. There are several different options with different pricing models, requirements, and do you need to to learn HTML or hire a web-site programmer…. Your head is about ready to explode.

FEAR NOT! Getting yourself and your business on the internet is easier than you think.

What you need for an Internet Presence
The basic elements you will need to give your business a presence on the internet are:

• An email address
• A web site
• A personalized domain name — e.g. www.yourbusinessname.com

Getting an email address and a website are easy and available more or less for free provided you do not want a personalized or custom domain name. You can have this stuff set up in minutes — literally — by going to Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Apple’s Mobile Me.

Decisions about your Business Internet Presence: the domain game
The key decision you have to make about your Internet Presence is whether you would like a custom domain or not. Would you like your email to come from yourname@companyname.com and have your website be www.companyname.com? If your answer to the preceding is “YES!” you will need a custom domain name.

Registering a domain name is easily done. You can use a domain registrar like GoDaddy.com or Network Solutions to do this. Visit the registrar’s site, search for the domain name you’d like for your business, create an account for yourself with the registrar, and voila! you have a custom domain — but wait until you have read the rest of this article. Eventually, I will have a tutorial on how to do this, but trust me, it’s pretty easy.

The next decisions you need to make regarding your site are:

• The type of website you want
• The look, and feel you want for your site
• How much time and money you want to spend

Types of Websites for your Small Business
Let’s start with the function you want your website to serve. There are five basic types to consider that can be mixed and matched as required:

• A product or services website
• A blog (a Web Log of your thoughts, ideas, etc.)
• An E-Commerce site, like Amazon or Buy.com

Most businesses need a website that present their product or services, and lets their customers know a little bit about them: who you are, product and service options, pricing, etc.

Depending on the business you are in, and particularly if you have a service business, it’s useful to have an attached blog. Blogs are a list of articles or a series of thoughts just like this one, that help people understand what you offer, as well a sense for what you are like to work with.

You may want an E-Commerce website that gives people the ability buy online as well as from your store if you have one. Additionally, an online catalog can entice people to come in to visit your store to look at items in which they are specifically interested.

The complexity of the functions you choose as well as the degree of customization you would like to have is the primary determinant of what it will cost you to get your business online.

Determining the Look and Feel For your Business Website

There are three basic types of websites that you can have:

• A static site that is coded in HTML
• A data-driven site, like a online catalog/store
• A combination of the two that’s based on a Content Management System (CMS)

Below is a quick comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of the different types of websites.

The Cost of Setting up your Internet Presence

Based on the preceding, the best option for small businesses — unless they are specifically interested in selling products using the web — is to use a content management system. Why? The cost of implementation and ease of use.

Content Management Systems (CMSes) are relatively easily installed, provisioned, and managed through major internet registrars and hosting service providers.

Also, Google offers FREE website hosting  as well as other business applications and productivity (email and calendaring) through the Google Apps Standard Edition. Basically, using a CMS is about as difficult as typing out an email and clicking send, so hence the recommendation.

Summary

Developing an internet presence for your business is pretty easy. The biggest decisions you need to make are:

1. Whether you want a personalized domain name
2. How much money/effort you want to put into building your site

If you don’t want to take the time to figure out how to get the basics setup, hire a consultant to help you get started with the basics. They can then show you how to do the rest on your own. If you have the time and interest in learning the basics, it’s very satisfying to do on your own. Check around on this site, there will be other articles and tutorials on this site that help.