What small business need to know before they spend money on their wordpress website.

WordPress is somewhere between flexible, and not, user friendly and not.

WordPress is not popular because it’s hands down the best. It is a good balance between free, well supported, rich features, community support, supports developers, modern and easy to use. WordPress is a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. If you don’t expect it to be perfect, you’ll less likely to be disappointed.

Sometimes WordPress is cheap, sometimes it is not. You can waste money by under spending on a poor site that under performs, or by having to spend more money monthly for small fixes that you didn’t budget for, or by spending loads on fancy design and features that later you hate and just remove.

If you expect it to do everything for free, then you’ll hate it. Best way to look at it as an ongoing balance between

•  the existing site and its features/content
• what you know you want, new content or features
• what you don’t know that you need/want.

So you need to spend time and money on what you need now, and spend time/money ongoing when your ideas change.  Some small things, you’ll be able to achieve yourself, or google ‘how to’ pages.

Technology and internet trends change quickly. You’ll learn more about options, what is possible, and what did and didn’t work. You’ll find you end up wanting to things like paying for google advertising, and your site needs support for that, that you had no clue about when you started your site.

I suggest spending a modest amount now, and replace the site 12-24 months later when you better understand what you want.

The alternative is to start simple, and spend monthly for new things you need. This is sort of like ‘start small, grow fast’ strategy.

By default wordpress allows you to add blog posts, and edit pages. But adding features is not so easy, or straight forward. Like if your site was designed to take ebooks, then it should be easy to add them. But if suddenly 1 morning you write an ebook, then you might find having an email paywall for the ebook isnt so easy.

 

By Scott Farrell on January 24th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress