WordPress is a free publishing platform. It will turn 5 years soon and you will be amazing of how many people are using it now, especially as Blog. Blog works so well for everyone to share personal journal on the web. You can sign up one for free and start blogging almost instantly!
Yes, Blog is free! Free is not good – at least for businesses. That is why, blogging spread like fire among individual users than businesses. It has becoming a New Marketing way for most businesses. Old corporate managers do not want to miss this new marketing opportunity, ended up setting one official corporate website together with an official Blog.
It was never easy to tell my customers that Blog and corporate website are the same. Fancy design still remains as the top-most-wanted feature for most of my customer. It was designed as like to please just the corporate website owner than people visiting it. Or, it may be the idea of web developer to push for beautiful layout, which in most case, the same result can be delivered by a page simple as Google main page.
WordPress has done so well in keeping the design separated from the content. It works like the theme in you Nokia Phone. You can choose to change the look and feel of your screen without entering all your contact in your address book again. This sounds simple but challenge is everyone has to adapt to a single format (post title, post slug, categories) of content, yet work in any page!
We have changed the look and feel of our corporate website several times, without worrying about rebuilding the content. But, you will be surprised with number of corporate websites still built with both content and design combined and ready to have them built from scratch again in their next revamp.
Bloggers are paving the way for the change of corporate website. They take the risk of change, trying up how the new format of content definition should work. Bloggers do not have website in the past. Creating a Blog is not a revamp to them, but something new.
But, for a company with already spending so much in the past in their website, it is hard for them to make the change. They choose not to make immediate decision. They are still on the look-and-see state, but will eventually follow!
There are three things happening now,
1. Businesses are starting to understand the importance of the goal of creating a website. A goal must be measurable, it can be number of order, number of people downloading your location map, number of support email received, except branding :)
2. The platform of Blog, such as WordPress, after a long 5 years of development are now ready to prove that the technology is mature yet simple to user now.
3. All of us are no longer limiting to our own job of scope. My partner just login to our corporate website, edited one of a page posted months ago and approved some comments. In that 5 minutes works, he turned himself into editor, proof reader, comment moderator, etc. The rules changed. You are taking over works of airline booking agent because you know it can be done online, faster and cheaper.
Business will soon no longer need a web developer!
Are you a web developer?
Free WordPress theme for your business
Yes, WordPress is a brilliant system, both as a blog, and as a nice CMS. :)
Time to source for alternate businesses. We have 5 years to do it before making online databases become as easy as blogging. :)
Change is not always good, but not changing is really suiciding. Accept the fact that the trend is changing is really painful, but not accepting the fact that the trend is slowly changing is 10 times more painful down the road when you’re older and you’re not able to work like mad like you used to when you’re younger just to fit the change.
It is true that many businesses are looking towards the WWW and Internet as their next Marketing avenue. However, they are still very conservative and unsure on how web site can help them. They don’t know whats the real value of the web site and how it can help them! In the end, opting for the cheapest solution to building their web site and without much consideration on the visitors to their web site. This is really sad for me :( They should learn how important a web site is for them and especially now when Open-Source blogging software like WordPress, Drupal and etc can help to increase their efficiency both online and offline :)
may i ask…joomla and wordpress which is better?if i have a business online sales which is best?
The same question has been asked many times by my customers too. My personal experience with Joomla is, it is way too complicated. I don’t like the data structure of Joomla. WordPress is making it a lot easier to understand, and things are in great orders, less bugs!
yeah, i am fully agree with this even i am a web developer, i have to turn to cms to convert and get some added value to my business
What CMS you use, Ikram?