WordPress is, without a doubt, one of the most popular content management systems or CMS available today. More than 1% of websites operational on the Internet use WordPress as their CMS. Considering that there are millions and millions of websites online today, 1% is truly saying a lot.

The reason why WordPress is so popular is because it provides its users many benefits. Primary of these benefits is that WordPress is open source and free to download. You can tweak your copy of WordPress to make it work the way you like it, and you do not have to pay for using it at all.

But one of the greater benefits other than you do not have to pay a shilling to use WordPress is its functionality. Using WordPress can truly save you time whenever you need to update or make changes to your website. Any webmaster will tell you that the reason why you need to use CMS, be it WordPress or not, is to make your work on your website less time-consuming.

How can using WordPress save you time in working on your site?

Easy Installation

Unlike a lot of CMS software, WordPress does not take its sweet time to get installed on your system. WordPress is actually popular for its so-called five-minute installations. You can start working on your site using WordPress in nearly no time at all.

Also, if it is your first time to use WordPress, you would not find the user interface worrisome or intimidating. As long as you know how to read and how to use your mouse, you would be fine with using WordPress even if you do not have any technical knowledge to guide you.

Organised Content

There would be many times when you would need to update your website but you want your updates to go live on a certain, specific date. Do you store your updates on your hard drive or on a removable storage disk and wait until that specific date to upload changes to your website?

With WordPress, you do not need to do that. You can upload your website updates just as soon as you finish them, even though they are not supposed to go live yet. Just schedule it to go live on that certain date.

This is certainly helpful if you have a blog and you work on all your posts for the week on a single night. You can schedule your blog posts to go live when they are supposed to go live.

Spam Filters

One annoying downside to having a website is getting a lot of spam comments and spam email on a daily basis. There are even websites where the spam goes up by the hundreds. With WordPress, however, you do not have to waste time swimming through spam. WordPress has a default plugin called Akismet, which automatically blocks them.

Categorisation for Easy Searching

If your website is made up of many pages, you would not want to spend a lot of time just hunting for a particular item. Your visitors would not want to do that, either. The solution to this would be categorisation, and it is a function that can be easily used with WordPress. Categorising the content of your website would make searching for items or pages faster.

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One thing I think we tend to forget is that the internet is still much like the Wild West of the United States in the 1800’s….unexplored and undeveloped. A place of tremendous opportunity for all who dare to set foot. There was gold in them there hills

Click on the image to the left to download a free wordpress ebook!

All the hard coders used to rip on Dreamweaver or Frontpage for being unpure when making web pages, but Dreamweaver made it possible for anyone who would spend some time learning to put up a website and make it look pretty good.

Xsitepro is a recent development, it’s kind of a hidden pocket of gold because not too many people use it and those that do really don’t know how to use it to its full potential. I can use Xsite to make a site and have it indexed and ranked just as quick if not quicker than wordpress. Its a nice tool for someone who wants to set up their own site and doesn’t know any html.

There’s no doubt that wordpress has blown the doors open when it comes to web development. Probably partly due to the fact that is open source. Just about anyone who can click a few buttons will be able to set up a wordpress site. These days, a little effort and some free plugins and you could have an awesome looking site….you’re still limited though and if the trend continues wordpress will eventually become good method for site development….instead of THE method of web development that it is today.

Learn everything you need to know about wordpress….most comprehensive guide I’ve run across from the Wordpress Queen!

I love wordpress. Its so simple, yet you can digg in and make it as complicated as you’re able.

This is just a guess, but I think the autoblogging craze will eventually leave a negative mark on wordpress. I have nothing against it, but big G always seems to burst the bubble of anything that works!

Rock on Wordpress!!!!

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Learning how to customize wordpress for small business applications is essential for anyone working with wordpress. Wordpress marketing has become one of the most popular blogging tools available on the internet today. What a lot of people do not realize though is that it is also a powerful Content Management System that is able to be used for more than just blogging.  When you use wordpress you have the ability to either a blog or use it as a static website, you can easily choose which type of wordpress design would be more effective for your application.

Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging tool but you no longer have to use it just for blogging anymore. The fact that it is open source and you can modify it beyond your wildest dreams with wordpress plugins and changing themes not  to mention anyone knowing a little php and html can jump right into the code and start hacking away, gives wordpress so many options that I don’t think any blogging or cms platform will ever catch up. Learning how to customize wordpress for your small business will open a whole new world for you. With just a few updates here and there you can also use it for your website and you can either in conjunction with a blog or no blog at all. Just the fact that Wordpress was once originally designed for a blogging platform gives Wordpress some compelling advantages. It is designed for easy publishing and changing your content whenever it is needed.  There are also other advantages that are great for small business owners as well.

Using WordPress For Your Small Business

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1. First of all Wordpress is SEO optimized. There are a few adjustments that you will need to make but overall there are several SEO benefits that Wordpress provides to you for free.  This saves you considerable amount of time and effort that is usually needed for providing a properly SEO organized wordpress blog. Search Engine Optimization scares away some of the most experienced marketers, however, seo plugins for wordpress make it easy even for the newbie!

2. Another great advantage of  Wordpress for small business owners is that the content is easily updated and you will not even have to know any HTML to get it done either.  You can easily create new pages or edit your existing pages using a simple rich text editor. This is another great way for you to save money when you are first creating your site. Wordpress is the favorite platform for those doing offline marketing.  As the website developer, you can easily set up a wordpress blog for any business and then give the owner simple permissions to add blog posts only.

3. There are also thousands of people in the internet world that create extensions of the Wordpress program.  Understanding how to customize wordpress can be learned in Rockstar Wordpress Designer…..and even the novice web designer can pick up a couple of tricks that will allow you to customize wordpress themes! Just think how many free themes and ratings, among hundreds of other options, are available to you for free.  For those working with a tight budget, you will not have to pay the hefty price you would normally have to for a web designer because these extensions will allow you to do it for yourself. I found 2 sources for very professional looking wordpress business themes at Gabfire Themes and StudioPress, they both have amazing flexibility and I would probably say they aren’t for the novice wordpress user.

4. If you happen to run into a problem or wish to add on custom features, it is very easy for you to find support as there are thousands of  Wordpress developers available on the net. All you need to do is type in Wordpress support in your favorite search engine and you will be amazed at the results that you will get.  Although if you’re like me, you really want to understand how to customize wordpress themes so you don’t have to pay someone else!

5. The final benefit for small business owners is that Wordpress is easy to install. There are many companies that also offer help with your quick install to get your site up and running in no time. They will install needed plugins and help you on your way to getting your first blog post online.

As you can see there are several different reasons why Wordpress would benefit your small business. Gabfire themes has a variety of themes for any local business or local business directory, while Brian Gardner’s StudioPress offers some amazing business themes that can make any one man operation look like a major corporation and make a major corporation  look like a million bucks! The key fact all revolves around either you knowing how to customize wordpress or hiring a designer who confidently knows  how to customize wordpress themes.

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You might wonder why you would want to install wordpress on your computer!

Well….you save a lot of time, you don’t have to ftp to your server and by having your blog on your computer you can experiment with themes, plugins  and other code to see the immediate effect of your changes.

First you have to install some software that allows you to create a server on your computer, then you would create a database on your computer and next you would install the newest version of Wordpress on your computer.

Rather than me tell you how to do it, Watch some of these videos….they’ll help you do exactly what you need to do! You’ll see some variations in the below videos but they should give you everything you need to install wordpress offline. If you want more, search YouTube for Install Wordpress Offline or Install Wordpress Locally.

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If you’re a WordPress junkie than you’re probably familiar with Brian Gardner’s custom magazine and newspaper themes. He creates some awesome stuff.

One of the features he uses and many more have picked up is the “featured content gallery”. This usually consists of a series of images that are rotated or rolled across a content box along with a text message.

You can see an example of the Content Gallery at  Xsiteproguide.com" target="_blank">Xsitepro Tips and Tricks.

It seems the content gallery draws attention and is the perfect place to advertise your most important posts. You could even use it as “space to rent” charging a premium price for this virtual real estate.

I’m not exactly sure of the evolution of the featured content gallery, however, I believe that Brian Gardner originally created it. You can find a free copy of the content feature gallery simply by clicking on the link.

They have excellent documentation and a forum….seems like some very nice folks. The video below will tell you exactly what you need to install and modify the feature gallery. I’ve seen this gallery on many, many newspaper and magazine themes. If you’re into that kind of format you might want to know a little more about it, just vist Content Feature Gallery.

Wow, I really need to update this theme

Featured Content Gallery – WordPress Plugin – Instructional Video – iePlexus from iePlexus on Vimeo.

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Every aspiring webmaster starts in a slightly different way. Some might have a teacher, some might learn in high school, maybe college, others grab a book and start reading, nowadays you can do a google search for free tutorials on “how to build a website” as you can see you are almost limited to your imagination or maybe fate!

I started by wondering how that page showed up in the browser. Honestly, I didn’t know what the word “browser” meant. I had no idea what html was and I didn’t know what “source code” defined.

The first time I looked at the html coding for a basic webpage my old gray cells started spinning, it literally is like learning a foreign language. And like a foreign language once you learn the basics you can form words, then sentences, then paragraphs and so on.

I started around 1999 by purchasing a couple of hard cover books on how to build a website. They were difficult to read and didn’t make much sense. I had no one to help me so I had to experiment myself.

I understood a little about how to build a basic page, then I learned more basics such as how to code an image into a page….trust me the learning is continual. Next I decided that I would look into a program that would build websites that had 2 views, something called a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) and a view that showed you the complete html source code while building your website.

The program I ultimately decided to purchase was called Dreamweaver.htm" target="_blank">Dreamweaver. Now, Dreamweaver is one of the most powerful software programs that can build websites. Learning Dreamweaver was almost as difficult as trying to learn html coding! The learning curve was extremely steep. I purchase manuals and video tutorials. Finally I felt competent enough to purchase a domain name and try to put up my first website. I did and you can see the first website I did at www.desktop-wealth.com. It’s really not pretty and there’s so much wrong with it that I could write a book….but I took action and did something.

Remember, your first website will be the worse website you’ll ever build. They only get better through time!

Today there are so many options that it would take many pages to discuss what is available. However I can narrow it down to a couple of the best.

First let me say, I really think it’s important for anyone wanting to design websites to make an effort to learn html, css and php. It doesn’t matter what you use for building your websites, sooner or latter you will run into a situation that needs manual editing of the html source code. Not knowing how to do that will leave you in the dark….but that’s where your education starts. A problem exists….you find out how to fix it.

Today I would recommend 2 different types of programs for building websites.

The first one is called a wordpress blog. Wordpress is a blogging content management platform used to build your blog. If you can get someone to install a blog on your website, you’ll be able to stumble along from day one writing posts and pages. Wordpress is very popular and you’ll be able to find many free and paid for tutorials explaining how to use and configure wordpress, which would be something you’ll want to do to get the most out of Wordpress. Here’s a couple of different wordpress blogs:

• Desktop-Wealth Blog
• Muscle Building Blog
• Coffee Blog

You can start a wordpress blog on your own domain, which is what I would recommend. However, if you just want to play around to see what blogging might be like you can set up a wordpress blog that is hosted by wordpress just go to www.wordpress.com and set up an account. I’d be remiss not to mention Blogger, you can also set up your own blog that is hosted by Blogger. Be aware though, if you start a blog in which you DO NOT control the hosting, you could lose it at any moment. If you post something they consider offensive or in violation of their terms, or maybe someone just doesn’t like you……they can dump your blog and you’ll lose all your work. Beware, that happened to me at Blogger. I lost a blog I had worked on for 2 years…you know why, they didn’t like some of my internet marketing ads…period then end, in a flash it was gone.

Next would be a Xsitepro.htm" target="_blank">website building program called Xsitepro. This program is probably the simplest way to start building a standard or static website. As with anything else you’ll have to spend some time learning how to use the program. But don’t worry, it comes with video tutorials and a written manual. Plus you can find many tutorials online and there is a user forum that is filled with helpful people….just post a question and someone will usually answer it in hours.

Xsitepro is particularly suited for newbies to learn how to build websites. It features a WYSIWYG editor, meaning you just type into a window…something similar to Microsoft Word. You can also view the source code and edit it. Even though it’s easily used by someone new to website building, there are many advanced features and is a handy tool for even the most experienced website builder.

A big, big benefit of Xsitepro is how it puts the pages together. You may not understand this now, but certain things are needed to get traffic or visitors to your website. It’s known as “Search Engine Optimization”, and this is what Xsitepro does automatically. A hundred pages or more could be written on how Xsitepro does this, but suffice it to say, Xsitepro builds websites and webpages and are search engine optimized…which for you means traffic.

If you’re new to building websites and want to build websites, consider investing in Xsitepro. If the budget is tight or non existent, just try using Wordpress…it’s free!

Tags: build website, Dreamweaver, how to build a website, first website, Wordpress, Xsitepro

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