Small Business Talk with MDzyn

WordPress has become a great option for website development and content management. It is now a viable tool for much more than a blog. However, it’s not the end all, be all either. There are many factors that influence a decision as to what environment and approach to take for a new website:

1) Will the site include a blog?

Although I highly recommended including a blog because it’s a great tool to create interest and activity around your subject or business, if you don’t have the time or resources to maintain it and keep it at list minimally fresh, it’s probably better to skip it. Blogs that do not contain fresh posts are not frequently re-visited and sort of a waste of time.

2) Do you have the time and/or resources to dedicate to keeping your site’s content fresh and current? Or will your site be launched and then hardly ever changed?

Best practice is to dedicate the time and resources to keep your site fresh. If this is the case, it may make sense to have a fairly simple way of making the changes yourself. WordPress shines here and may be a great development solution. If on the other hand, maybe you’re a start-up and just need a website so that your business cards have a web address and make you look like a viable business, then it may be a better choice to build your website in another fashion and simply call your developer to make infrequent content changes for you.

3) Will you be happy with a template-based look and feel for your site? Or, do you want something completely custom that in no way resembles another site or structure?

There are thousands of WP templates out there, but there’s a huge difference in the quality of them as well. You have to be careful as some contain sloppy and/or malicious code and other bad qualities. If a quality template serves as your starting point, and it’s one that’s highly customizable, then your brand can be applied at a high level and the result can be “almost custom”. Starting from scratch and building a completely custom site requires more budget but also results in the exact result you desire in terms of look and feel.

4) How many “bells and whistles” will your site require?

This is another area where WordPress saves time and money because there are so many pre-developed tools that can be implemented  into your site without major development time. For example: social media links and tools, scheduling calendar, blog archives, etc.

To recap, the decision as to how your site will be developed, what environment it will be developed in, and the associated costs to design and build your site have many variables. MDzyn Solutions would be happy to help you determine the best plan for your site and design and build it for you at a great value.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2011 at 11:59 am and is filed under Small Business Ideas/Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.