Whether you are a personal trainer or not you may find this post helpful when it comes to setting up your first website.
Just about every hosting company out there offers some kind of simple tool to quickly build an attractive website and maybe even have it operational in the next 60 minutes. Though I am not intensely familiar with all of these basic HTML editors I can tell you that their ease of use may seem appealing but over the long term they will require far more knowledge and time commitment to produce a website that works the way you want it to.
The problem with the HTML editors is they are not made to provide easy optimization for the less tech savvy individual. If you understand the ins and outs of website coding and optimization you can easily overcome this but I would still argue that WordPress will handle it easier, faster, and better. If you are not familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization understand that an optimized website will be more likely to be found on the first search page and will typically drive visitors to your website that you didn’t send there by word of mouth.
Using WordPress makes adding new pages and items to your website nearly as easy as writing an email. Visually it can be reconfigured with drag and drop widgets and only the smallest amount of direct HTML knowledge is really required.
Now when you combine WordPress with a number of powerful plugins it really goes to work for you. Starting with All in One SEO Pack you will be given the opportunity to give each new post a search engine crawler friendly keyword title, description and even a list of specific key words. Additionally you can also configure a number of options like to create meta tags from your post tags for instance. Meta tags are placed specifically for the search engine crawlers to read, identify and categorize your website and its content. None of these happen with a website builder included in most host packages unless you do it all manually.
Other plugins like SEO Images and SEO smart links will create automatic keyword links within your content, allow you to apply keyword titles to your images and so on. All these little things will likely go unnoticed to you for a time but you will see the effect they soon have in your site rank and its ability to generate traffic (ie. Potential customers) to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are thousands of plugins available and not just for better ranking but also for time saving features like posting video content as well as all kinds of elements to utilize social networking to its fullest.
In my opinion WordPress is far superior if your goal is to build a website that brings you customers rather than one you like the look of but nobody ever sees.
Rick couture July 9, 2010 at 2:30 pm | Permalink |
WordPress is powerful and flexible, but still may be a bit too complex for some. For one of my simple websites I used a free design service with jimdo.com.
They provide both a super simple user interface and free hosting. The only drawbacks are the limited design templates and that your web address will include the domain jimdo.com
I was pleasantly surprised to see that my free site actually does rank fairly well on google for my target keywords. If you want to put up a quick, easy and free website to try out an idea, jimdo may be worth checking out.
hawkfitness April 22, 2011 at 10:45 am | Permalink |
I use my quick blogcast from my godaddy account but I’ve been wondering if WordPress is better lately. This answered a few questions so thanks