Digital Wild West

Get your own website - or ‘blog’

How difficult is having your own website?

What is the cost (and the hidden costs)?

What is a ‘blog’ and how do I get one?

Most likely reasons you want a website:

• Make money on the Internet
• Family web site for sharing news, photos and genealogy
• Person website - hobby or interest
• Community or non-profit - charity, school, association, club .. etc.
• Home business website - support an existing business
• Medium-sized business website for an existing business that needs a web presence, and is way overdue

The COST of being online is usually the overriding issue, followed closely by difficulty.

Good news

Websites (and domain names) are cheap. Your own website - business or personal - is an excellent way to define your business OR yourself. It’s creatively satisfying and can become an addictive pastime (hmm … good news?).

Bad news

Business websites are time-consuming and ‘high-maintenance’. Visitors are hard to get, yet essential to your online success.

Visitors arrive from three places -

• Search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)
• Your website gets ‘discovered’ and enjoys 15 minutes of fame (promotional tactics)
• Pay (serious) money for a Pay Per Click campaign

Getting listed in Google, MSN or Yahoo is easy but can take months before your pages appear. Even then, visitors are slow to arrive. You are competing with EIGHT BILLION other indexed web pages. Good luck!

More bad news

Managing websites greater than 50 pages demands expensive management software (on your PC)  UNLESS you keep it very simple, almost primitive, due to:

• Complexity of links between pages
• Creation of new content and updating old
• Changes to all 50 or 100 pages

Without this software your ‘creative’ options become limited and dysfunctional, broken or ugly websites more likely.

Fortunately a free workaround exists - but ‘free’ has a price.

WordPress ~ why?

While all the reasons against a conventional website might drive you to choose a blog, it also has management overheads.

In fact, when I made the move to WordPress blogs to replace or complement my websites, I hated them.

Enough agro that the web-based interface was agonizingly slow, in addition I couldn’t get my brain around how to make it not ‘just a blog’ and more website-like.

Blog management systems  are stone-age with their tedious maintenance - tweaking code, upgrading, updating, forcing the blog to behave like a half-smart website - eating my time away.

I hated even more having my original content created on a website and depending on backups tediously created and downloaded - never knowing if my labors had integrity till D-Day restore following some catastrophe.

With around ten blogs how could I find the time to confidence-test the backups?

How could I even find time to learn and practice the restore drill??

While Windows Live Writer is a freebie godsend to offline editing - overcoming the inanely onerous web-based editor - I’ve still yet to test the restore!

Even ready-cut themes help only marginally. It took days to massage this beautiful WordPress theme by Milo into what I needed to make DigitalWildWest a barely-practical knowledge-based help site, and not a mere diary or news-zine.

Inexorably WordPress

Even with the plethora of downsides, I chose to move to WordPress for the ultimate advantage of a database back end feeding a CSS-formatted theme. If one strays not too far from the WordPress limits, managing websites becomes paradoxically easier the bigger they get.

Not to mention (so I will) they are darlings of the search engines and enjoy immense social-networking bias.

Finally, many free themes are absolutely breathtaking in sophistication, design and branding features - so long as you choose carefully. 

I would expect MILO IIIIVII to charge me a grand or more for this stunning free design that I’ve managed to corrupt trying to customize and re-brand.

To top it off, WordPress is pre-eminent amongst a flotilla of best-of-breed FREE software enjoying the immortality of community support.