Amir Helzer is a business owner, blogger, and webmaster, who runs ICanLocalize, a human and technology-based translation service for small businesses who want to move their product or services into multilingual markets.
Some businesses start blogging to expand their website. Some start with a blog. For the strongest online presence, business websites need both static content and dynamic news, a.k.a a blog. The blog builds traffic and establishes authority. The static pages helps convert that interest into business.
Essential Content for Static Pages
When planning static pages for a business site, this content is essential to serve a local audience anywhere in the world.
- Information about what you’re offering – this could be your consultancy services, an e-book, affiliate deals, courses or anything else you’re selling.
- Benefits – how what you’re offering serves to make someone’s life better. Features lead to benefits, but the benefits are what really matters.
- Examples, testimonials and case studies.
- Support information – let people see answers to common questions
- Contact and ordering information (along with a firm satisfaction guarantee)
Using WordPress as a CMS
WordPress has everything you’ll need to build a complete website, without installing any plugins or changing anything. In fact, it’s already the most popular content management system being used today, competing with established CMS such as Joomla! and Drupal.
In WordPress, use ‘pages’ as your static contents and ‘posts’ as blog entries. Pages can have sub-pages allowing to create a complete hierarchy of contents. Using WordPress, you can also select a specific page to be your home page. Categories and tags make it easy to jump between related pages.
Choose or build a theme that displays posts and pages properly for both human visitors and search engines and you’re ready to open for business.
Building usable Websites
A effective website is critical to business anywhere in the world. Points to consider:
- Navigation – good navigation will make it clear where I am, what to expect on this page and where to go to get what I need. It should include the top tab for main sections and drop-down menus (or the equivalent) for sub-sections. Context, knowing where I am within the bigger picture, is important at all times.
- Page layout – A good website follows conventions. Don’t make me learn your rules. Visitors who need to learn how to use a website from scratch, often leave before they do.
Whether you’re just starting out or already have a pretty large website, you can get great ideas from Steve Krug‘s “Don’t Make Me Think“.
Search Engine Friendliness
A few years back, people considered search engine optimization (SEO) as a sort of witchcraft. Today, search engine spiders can find their way around a website and analyze page contents efficiently. Follow basic principles, you’ll be fine.
WordPress takes care of most SEO concerns for you by rendering valid HTML and using a correct hierarchy of headings. You can help (a lot) by writing short, topical pages, which search engines can easily understand. You’ll find it’s very helpful for humans, too, especially those you want to find your business and become your customers.
There are some good points you have there, but wordpress makes it difficult to use different navigation depending on what page you are on.
This post is going to help a lot of business’!
A short read. But I find it more business oriented. It’s a good, basic guide for businesses who wants to create a blog for marketing purposes.
Also, I went out and researched what CMS mean. You didn’t define it. I guess it’s good. But it really offers nothing new.
Just being honest. :-)
Good entry (albeit a bit brief). I’ve wondered for years why “business” sites don’t use this approach…far too many of them simply slap up a few static pages and forget about them. Baffling.
I agree. It’s short and something a bit dry as compared to the other posts here on ProBlogger.
But hey, quick and short is does the job most of the time.
definitely a great tool for beginners but not too sure for pros.
A while back I played with Joomla for a possible CMS site, but found that, with a little tweaking, WordPress was much easier and, for me, a better solution.
Great post and I enjoyed the clarity of your information. Very helpful for those looking to take their WordPress site beyond a simple blog.
After reading this article, I am planning to build a static page in my website and to render some services. And my already existing blog will bring in some traffic(probably!)..
I agree with your concept of making it easy for the reader. If it’s complicated, I quickly move on. I have actually had trouble finding contact information on business store website? And I like short and sweet posts on occasion! Thx.
Nice one! Nothing too ground breaking, but some very good tips :) Keep up the great work!
this is exactly what i am trying to do with a site i am working on. it can be a bit fiddly to create a custom wordpress theme but i think it is worth it.
my intention is to basically have a site that is more like a traditional site than a blog but using wordpress. I’ve used wordpress a bit so it’s easier than learning joomla or drupal.
Great point on using wordpress as a website builder. Creating and managing pages is so much easier and the best part is not having to FTP files to your website directory.
how about a list of examples of full more traditional non blog sites that have been completely built on the WordPress platform. That would be helpful and give us something to view as a reference.
Thanks.
I found this very interesting idea of making a website using a WordPress blog by accident, when I clicked on the word “business” in a previous Problogger post by Mark Hayward entitled “Launching your next venture using social media – 5 lessons learned”. https://problogger.com/launching-your-next-venture-using-social-media-5-lessons-learned/
This took me to the “website” (really WordPress blog platform) for an enchanting looking guesthouse on a lovely island in Puerto Rico – oh! look at those aerial shots of beautiful beaches. http://www.palmettoculebra.com/
The tab links along the top of the blog’s “home page” take you to the static “webpages” (altho clicking on “Rates” brings up a floating window).
The text link to the guesthouse blog is below the top picture, and I see the blog is at a different URL – I guess both could be hosted at the same URL, as suggested above by using both static and dynamic pages. But for Search Engine Optimisation, I would guess there could be advantages to deliberately separating them, so you have to have links between the two separate URLs, which search engines use to improve your page ranking (allegedly). You can’t get that advantage, if its all at the same URL.
I hope I’ve understood what Mr Hayward has done on his guesthouse site correctly here (that he’s used blogging WordPress to create a standard website), and that this really is an example of what Amir Helzer is talking about above.
Either way, what a lovely interlude to dream of going to such a tropical island…
Kind regards from autumnal Britain.
Here’s one I did, Political: http://www.nectardesign.com – how’s that for the capabilities of WordPress? :)
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I think it is fantastic and looks like a regular good static site AND NOT a blog. Really nice work. Do you use the “blog part” (comments) of WP at all on that site?
I hope OTHERS will post their WP sites that look like regular sites and not blogs. Thanks!
I use WordPress to operate our portal http://www.whitepapersource.com and it works like a charm.
Great article! I would say that great minds think alike because WordPress: Beyond A Blog is actually the title for a presentation I will be giving at the upcoming WordCamp: Toronto on October 4/5. For those who are in or near the Toronto area, the event is only $25 to register and has some great speakers lined up. Matt Mullenwig apparently also has some surprises that he’s going to let be known to the world!
My presentation will have two focal points:
1) How to take a css template (or existing design) and “WordPressify” it. This will cover everything from the standard configuration changes you want to make to WP like Permalink structure as well as some core plugins you might use and how to integrate them to the various display templates (index.php, home.php, single.php, etc).
2) How to take WP further into the realm of being a true CMS. Specific examples will likely include how to make your own portfolio (or non e-commerce product display site), css gallery and more.
Will also discuss some of the more advanced plugins out there which are really pushing the boundaries outside of what WP was meant to do.
I’ll publish the slides on my site after the conference, so if anyone is interested but unable to attend you will be able to visit <a href=”http://www.idealienstudios.com to download. Note that I’m using the development of my site (portfolio, services offering, gallery, etc) to build the presentation so that is why it still – temporarily – just says Coming Soon :P
This post lacks essence in comparison with other posts published here on problogger. It is almost completely devoid of any actionable and specific tips and it could be useful only to absolute beginners (and even they would get only a very vague hint or two).
Maybe the problem is that the title promises too much and the post itself underdelivers. I would expect specific techniques helping me use WordPress as a full website – tips regarding skinning, plugins, etc.
While WordPress SEO isn’t witchcraft, “out of the box” WordPress still gets you nowhere with SEO. You have to change the permalinks and use one or two choice SEO plugins. You have to know how search actually works and understand your market’s search mindset.
Using WordPress as a CMS for a small site is a piece of cake. Using it as a CMS for a large site takes some intensive planning and template/file design (as noted in the blockquote in the comment abover).
I’m planning to build a web site soon – already have the domain name. I had thought I’d build it the “traditional” way, but am now looking at WordPress as a CMS.
WebHelperMagazine has a great post showing WordPress CMS sites. Ford, the US Post Office, others.
I just created a 2nd real estate site and a site for my brothers construction company using these same principals. I love wordpress and the ability to add plugins and themes with ease.
I’ve just installed WordPress on my blog after using Joomla for years. In my opinion its such a better CMS, being fully SEO friendly out of the box helps massively.
With Joomla you would always have to install 3rd party modules to help manage SEO.
WordPress = way forward : )
Terrific post! I may have to trackback this afternoon since my website runs off WordPress and so far, has met all my needs nicely. Thanks.
wordpress is quite efficient for business. it is going to be much more better if you always have someting to talk about regarding your business from time to time. Related keywords indexed on google means more potential customers to your website :).
Great post!!!
Great intro article to WP Darren.
I’ve been writing about the WordPress platform for a while. Using it for major sites is very possible, I have an article on my site about corporate WordPress installations from companies like the New York Times, NASA, and Ford.
Something Darren didn’t point out- is the incredibly large development community at WordPress.org that has thousands of plugins (doing all sorts of things)
I agree the article is a little non-actionable, but it is an intro article to an idea. For that point it does the job well.
I don’t like the title. It implies that a blog is less than a “full website.”
Tell me TechCrunch or Smashing Magazine is less than a full website…
I like wordpress but I don’t compare it with drupal. Actually with drupal you can make everything that wordpress do, but with wordpress you can’t do everything that drupal do, and if you still want to use wordpress to mime drupal you’ll spend a lot of money on development.
darren can u please help me with the widget bucks problem … its seriously annoying …
This is exactly what we are doing for some of our clients at G2 Web Media. And WordPress is built just so you can. No longer are you limited to a simple blog. You can have everything you need to be proactive with your marketing. And you can use such a site/blog to provide massive amounts of information to your audience/readers in a form and fashion they can understand and use.
Thank you for this informative article. I especially like your idea on how to use the static pages. I will definitely be implementing some changes to my site on account of reading this. Thanks for sharing.
I’m currently working on taking my WordPress blog and turning it into a complete site with a blog, podcast, static content, and information products, all using the WordPress CMS. The one thing I didn’t know was that you can set a certain post to be the “home page” post. I’ve been using WordPress for a while, but I didn’t know it had this feature. I guess I never needed it until now, so I didn’t look.
Thanks for another great article!
This does seem like a very good avenue for businesses that want to integrate the blog and static components. Building both on the same platform makes for fewer headaches later. I’ve seen people try to tie a new blog to an established website using different platforms — not very easy. I tried WP briefly and was wondering if what you wrote here applies to the wordpress dot com platform or just the downloaded version running on your host?
WordPress is amazingly powerful and fully customizable. Even a non-techie, given the right training could build a very good website with WordPress. Great post.
I’ve used WordPress for several full websites, and it works really well.
The only thing I’d really like to see would be custom forms for different types of content. Entering a lot of custom fields takes time, so something to speed that up would be nice.
please post LINKS to the sites built using WP so we can see some of them. Thanks!
I agree, why not use wordpress. It gives you all the functionality and a basic framework. You can then extend it.
nectardesign is done very well too. Good job there.
I am one of these suckers who started out to build my site all on my own to save money/time etc…well…what a shambles! After starting out with Joomla, and then moving to others before arriving back at WordPress…I have decided it is the best solution for what I need right now. I see myself outgrowing WP as my site gets more complex, but right now I am stuck with the issue of having my blog outside of my website, and it’s domain! (migration is my next project!). For those interested, my WP site can be found at http://www.buzzle.com.au
Thanks, Colin. :)
“I hope OTHERS will post their WP sites that look like regular sites and not blogs. Thanks!”
We’ve done just that at squob.com, a new website focused on cutting-edge RV design. Using a magazine-style theme and WordPress functionality makes it very easy.
As a result, we’ve been able to focus on the content without spending days on HTML and CSS, or being stuck with a single column of content.
My first website was a site long before it became a blog. When I added the blog, I converted all of the data over to WordPress pages. You can see it at: http://consecrated-life.org
Good post Lara. I plan to grow my Blog into something more in the future. it’s just a matter of figuring out which route I am going to take.
Thanks for the great tips. I guess it’s time to give wordpress a shot. If I were to break it, I now know where to go for great help.
Gary McElwain
My WordPress site is both static and dynamic. It is based on a theme by Brian Gardener and was customized by Men with Pens. They both did an awesome job!
http://blueduckcopy.com
@Marcin, you’re right that this is a very basic introductory post. What I discovered is that many people have too much technical skills and too little understanding of what they should do with them. Explaining the specifics of how to build a CMS template without what it needs to achieve is a bit like putting the horses before the carriage.
@SBA, You can create pages and use a CMS like theme on wordpress.com, but that would probably prove a bit against the idea of presenting a full website for a business. For a tiny cost, you can have it installed on your server and be rid of any restrictions.
Everyone looking for in-depth WordPress specific advice and how-tos should search WordPress.org’s database, or http://lorelle.wordpress.com.
I think that it’s a great idea to use wordpress to create a website but it’s important to know where wordpress is just not enough. When you’re creating a big website and a blog is just one of many different pages and parts of the site then wordpress isn’t enough.
I have considered doing this myself before but I haven’t ever actually gotten around to it. For the time being my WordPress blog consumes too much time to worry about making more static websites at the moment anyway :)
This is, at the very least, a decent post, in that it has inspired me to take the leap in retooling my business’s website (as soon as I finish my law school applications). However, I must say, I could certainly use some more information. I think this would make a good introductory post to an entire series on the topic.
“definitely a great tool for beginners but not too sure for pros.”
Heck, I’m a beginner and still have a hard time with it. :) Its better (easier than Joomla!) though. Joomla was a nightmare for me. I never used HTML and CSS before a month ago and I was able to figure it out in about a week with a library book when I wasn’t able to figure Joomla out even after three months.
My blog is WordPress, but for my site, I know that alone wouldn’t be enough.
@Lara, That is one way of going about it, but if you have 12 different sidebar variations like one site of mine it can be a really pain, especially when other CMS’ can handle it much easier.