Many businesses may already have a Facebook page, or if they are more web literate, a Twitter account and or a Tumblr. Older businesses may have a Multiply or MySpace. If you are a business owner looking for a way to improve your online presence, you may want to start a WordPress website.

Why use WordPress

WordPress is a good step forward for businesses looking to advance their presence on the web. Search is still relevant in this era of social, and can in fact help push your social media presence forward. Aside from that, you would simply want to have a website as a handy source of information for potential and existing clients.

WordPress.com

We need to make a clear distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. To put it simply, WordPress.com is WordPress’ free blogging service on their own servers. WordPress gives their bloggers a lot of flexibility with what they can do, but advertisements are not allowed. WordPress also offers premium services, but most WordPress users do not opt for it.

WordPress the program

That is because most people go to WordPress.org to download the WordPress software itself. The WordPress program is a content management system. Whereas a blog is a simple online journal which you can update daily, CMS programs provide more features than are available in blogs. With a content management system, not only are you able to publish and edit regular journal entries, you can change how users see your website, what page they get to see first, even how the World Wide Web finds and accesses your entries. In fact, WordPress can make you a website that is not a blog at all.

WordPress as FOSS

The WordPress program is FOSS, or free and open source software. What this means is you are free to use and modify the program any way you wish. This flexibility has allowed developers to add no end of applications on top of it, many of which (although not all) are free. For the sake of simplicity, most developers have chosen to make plugins and themes compatible with the original WordPress software.

Most people aren’t aware of it, but FOSS have played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the World Wide Web. Many of the basic operations that run the web on a fundamental level, like webhosting, email and compiling, run on FOSS.

The top of the hill

WordPress is also the most popular blogging/CMS software today. Because everyone was free to add their applications to it, people volunteered to make plugins and themes in droves. Subsequently, most WordPress plugins are free, in keeping with the program’s nature. The rich support WordPress received put it on top of the competition.

Of course, that is not all WordPress has going for it. It’s also very easy to learn and use, and also easy to place into your own webhost. If you ever have problems with your WordPress site, it’s a simple matter to replace the software to get it up and running again.

Why businesses should make a WordPress site

So, knowing all this, why should you, the small (or big) business owner, make a WordPress site?

To put it simply, you will want to have a WordPress site to give yourself a presence on the web. You will want to make your own site so you are not reliant on other websites for that presence, and you will have the freedom to do what you want on it.  That website will also be indexed in all the search engines, so if people search for you on Google or Bing, they can find out more about you directly from the source.

And why WordPress? Because it’s the easiest way to set up that site, for all the reasons outlined above.

If you’ve decided you want to go ahead with making a WordPress site, here are some basics.

The basics for a self-hosted WordPress site

At the very minimum, what you need to make a WordPress site you own are a web browser , a webhost, an FTP program and the WordPress software. Let’s go through each briefly:

Web browser

Of course, the web browser is the program you are using to read this from right now. You need a web browser handy to double check what the site looks like before and when it goes online.

A webhost

Webhosting is a service where you lease space from a third party to host your website. Hosting your own website in your home, or even your own office, is usually too cost prohibitive for most people, and it can also become difficult to maintain. The industry practice is to lease space from webhosts because they can rely on them to keep their sites on the web all the time. Examples of webhosts include HostGator, Go Daddy and Amazon Web Services.

Webhosting is a paid service, so why would you want it? It is not a free service in the same way that Facebook or Twitter is free. However, when you host a site on your own servers, you are no longer beholden to Facebook’s Terms and Conditions, and gain the freedom to do what you want with your website.

FTP program

Do not be intimidated by the term file text protocol. In simple terms, it’s the language used by the World Wide Web to send files from one computer to another. Your webhost puts your website’s files in a computer called the FTP server, and the computer you use to access those files in the server is the client.

You use an FTP program to access your website’s files in your webhost’s computer (the FTP server) from your computer (the FTP client). Commonly, FTP programs are referred to as FTP clients, but this is understood to mean FTP client programs. Popular FTP programs include Filezilla, Cyberduck, and WinSCP.

The WordPress software

Once you’ve picked a webhost, downloaded an FTP program, and you are ready to download the WordPress program itself. The steps you actually take to install WordPress into your webhost can differ based on your webhost, but can essentially be broken down to these:

1) Get the WordPress software
2) Make a database for WordPress on your server, and add yourself as a user
3) Upload the WordPress software to your webhost

Famously, WordPress has instructions for a five minute install. Because WordPress is an industry standard, most webhosts have setups that make installing the program even easier for them.

Another great thing about the WordPress software is if it ever crashes and you have to start over, manually reinstalling everything is easy. You can always replace it with a new copy of the WordPress software. You just need to make sure you save the files which have your data, which are the wp-config file and the wp-content folder.
If you want to learn more about using WordPress, you can head on over now to the WordPress Codex to find out all you will need to know about installing, using and maintaining a WordPress site. The WordPress community also has its own forums where users provide one another support. All this information is free of charge, so go ahead and check them out now!
WordPress users, let us know what you think of this article or share your own experiences using the WordPress software in the comments below!
Photo: Automattic/Wordpress CEO Tony Schneider accepting the 2007 Crunchies award. Photo by Lisa Brewster