Without a properly designed and functioning website, a lot of your marketing efforts will go to waste. Before you look at online marketing options you must have your website up and running properly.
Website formats
Let’s talk about website formats and the different options available to you when you are ready to start.
- HTML Site – There are basic HTML pages and/or individual pages that can be incorporated into a website. This is how almost all websites were built several years ago. They had multiple pages hyper‑linked together.
- Template Based Site Builders – Site builders that you can obtain through providers such as Go Daddy and 1&1 are turnkey. You buy your domain and set up your website. However, with this format you don’t have a lot of controller flexibility.
- CMS Systems – Content Management Systems, like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
In my opinion a content management system (CMS) is ideal for a business, due to its scalability. In any of these platforms, you have the ability to change your navigation as you go, add as many pages as you need and easily scale out your site.
If you have your website built in HTML format with graphics behind the website, and you wanted to add a new section, you would have to start from scratch. You would need to go back to the graphics and modify all of the pages in order to add the new section to your navigational structure.
With a CMS, everything is built behind code enabling you to apply easy edits and to add multiple pages.
As you will see in the search engine optimisation post, you will have the ability to have a page for each one of your services and each city in which you operate.
A CMS allows you to create your pages in a scalable format without having to mess around with the graphics or do anything that is difficult to control. Also, it is easy to access, modify, and update.
Using formats like WordPress, you may access the back-end administrative area at yourcompany.com/login.
After entering your username and password, you will find there is a very easy to edit system with pages and posts which function similarly to Microsoft Word.
You can input text, import images and press “save”, forcing all new edits to be updated on your live website. It is straightforward and easy to use, even for those without much experience.
Content Management Systems have intelligently structured linking between pages and content, making it extremely search engine friendly. I have found that this method tends to be better than regular HTML options.
In a lot of cases, a blog is going to be automatically bolted onto a CMS based website providing you with a section where you may feed updates. In the SEO chapter, we cover the importance of creating consistent updates and blogging regularly.
Another benefit of content management systems is being provided with a variety of plugins you can choose to incorporate on your website. You can easily pull in your social media feeds, YouTube Videos and check-ins.
You may also syndicate your website to automatically post any new updates to your social media profiles. You can add map integration where people can click to either get instructions or view a map to find out the areas in which your company operates. There is a surplus of features available within a CMS that you can’t necessarily do with a non-CMS type option.
Whether you are looking to build a website from the ground up, you are just getting started, or you feel like you simply need a redesign, I highly suggest that you do so in CMS, ideally in WordPress.
WordPress is a fantastic platform and very easy to use. It’s the most adopted website platform available with many developers using it. It’s constantly being updated and improved and I have found it to work very well for different businesses.
