Now that you have your WordPress website up, you want to coordinate it to your business’ brand, its tone and content in order to maximize a more effective impact. No need to look amateurish.

Research shows that 75% of visitors form an opinion of your brand based on the impression your website gives them. Of course, you are so much more than your website, however it is your website that’s representing you/your business in the online world.

Whether you have an existing brand or looking to develop a new one– 

Make your website match your business.

Along with everything else. To get people to step thru your door, and make contact, it helps you to have branding that is consistent, authentic, and attractive to your target audience: your logo, branding, and newsletters, your business tone of voice, your Call-to-Action, the atmosphere of your physical office or shop, the looks of your social media platforms and marketing. So on.

Talk to me if you’re unsure how to pull yours all together. This is the kind of stuff I like to focus on. My contact info is below in the footer. ❧

After you’ve set up your website, there are a few things required to keep your website running smoothly.

Domain Registration:

As explained here, your registration should always stay current, whether you have this registered separately or bundled together with your hosting.

Hosting:

Support & updates to your hosting account is automatically included in your purchase. This includes things you want to do ON your server. Such as turn your http to https, update your MySQL, Php compatibility, and such like.

Website Back End:

Like cars need regular tune ups, the vehicle of your choice also needs to be constantly kept up to date and maintained lest hackers find a way in. This is the responsibility of whoever’s running your car – your website developer usually.

All these these things and more need to be kept constantly up to date:

• WordPress Core CMS files
• WordPress Theme
• Plugins
• Site security
• Contact form security

Updates are constantly being released, and if they are not kept up with, your website may break. . . when it gets out of compliance and outdated; and worse, your site becomes much more susceptible to hacking and phishing attempts.

All Together:

I take care of the techy stuff so you don’t have to. I am happy when I see you focused on your business and your actual web content.

When you purchase hosting with us, and are using WordPress; all of the above routine backend tasks are bundled together as one low price in your yearly Hosting & Maintenance renewal.

Or not:

However, if you prefer to purchase hosting only, and deal with your website’s backups, updates, maintenance, security, etc on your own- you may. I’m happy to teach you (or your designated web person) how to keep up with all of this.

Now let’s put the basic parts of a website together:

 

Yay! Now you have a website!

Once you have a website up — congratulations! Your next step now is to customize it, keep it current, attract and engage visitors.

Stay tuned by signing up for Anna Blueberry Digital Media’s newsletter below/in the column. We’re also on social platform, check out the links in the footer.

Around here we are using the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) when developing websites.

Why? These days over 40% of websites are powered by WordPress! This makes WordPress one of the most widely recognized and used system.

Now, I’ve had past experiences with Drupal, Shopify, and Wix. They range widely from excessively complex to easy-but-limited editing capabilities. Since shifting towards WordPress(.org, not .com), it’s been easy to concur with the current trend towards this highly recommended CMS.

WordPress is not excessively complicated and expensive, nor too cheap and limited. Free and easy to install, capable of accommodating a wide range of purposes, from a simple blog set up to easy e-commerce solutions, to membership sites and directories.

WordPress can truly be customized to meet your needs for any level your business or organization is at.

So whether you want a website you can edit and maintain yourself, or have a professional develop it for you, consider using WordPress.org

Have questions about WordPress? Please ask me!

Now that we’ve covered the preliminaries of having parking space (hosting), and reserving it in your name (domain names), let’s talk about the car itself.

A majority of websites today run on a CMS, that means a

Content Management System.

As the name says, It’s a way to organize your files on the server in a way that gets seen by the world (meaning seen online) yet from within an easily workable system (meaning you can easily make the changes yourself).

It is the most popular type of vehicle used these days for a website.

There are many choices and types of CMS from Drupal to WordPress to Wix to custom. Covering all ranges of prices & complexity.

In my next post in this series, we’ll talk about why I use WordPress