Winning awards is one of the best PR tools around.  BRW are now calling for entries for their Fast Starters edition to be published in April.  Details can be found here.

You can’t be in business today without a web site.  There is no shortage of web developers ready and willing to build you a great site.  There are challenges however.  In most cases, you want search engines such as Google to find your site, not just when someone types in your businesses name, but also when they type in search terms that are relevant to your business.  We are in the business of financial planning, so ideally for instance, we would like to be found when someone typed “Self Managed Super” or “Key Person Insurance” into Google.

There are so many web sites however, that Google has to be pretty discerning. The earlier post looks at how this works.  Without doubt however, an important aspect is that your site is regularly updated, and is content rich.  Now a standard “brochure” style web page can find this difficult.  The web site owner typically can not easily edit the site.  They would usually need to go through their developer.  Given an hourly rate will be charged, minor tweaks & additions tend to be put off.  Certainly, adding completely new pages, or promoting a short term special cannot be achieved without some expense incurred in having the web developer complete the work.

A partial solution to this problem is to incorporate a blog into the site.  This is what we did with Affordable Advice.  This is a professionally developed site with a Blog which we can update.  We have been very happy with the site and the developers Mecomm.  For some businesses however there is a lower cost alternative.

Why not use a blog engine to build your entire site?  We have previously mentioned Mixergy as a site we are big fans of.  This is an example of a blog based site.  A good Australian example is Katie Toland Photography. 

Katie has the advantage of being creative as well as tech savvy.  Her site looks great, and as I understand it, works extremely well in a business context.

The Guidance site (the one you are now in) has been built using the open source (and therefore free) blog engine Wordpress.

We used Wordpress because we were familiar with it through Affordable Advice, and also because it’s free.  When first downloaded, it is fully functional and quite adequate for a personal blog.  For business uses however it is essential to add a theme.  This permits you to insert things like company logo’s and footers.

There are may free themes available.  We had a bit of an experiment with a few of these but didn’t find one that achieved what we were after.  Instead we elected to pay for a business theme from RichWP.   This cost USD$69.  I suspect that had we persevered we would have found a free theme package that would have done the job, but quite frankly, there are too few hours in the day, and for the sake of about AUD$78, I was happy enough to pay.  The added advantage of paying for a theme is that you have some you can email when you get stuck.  This doesn’t happen a lot fortunately, but it is nice to have someone to ask.

Blog engine sites wont work for every business.  If you are an online retailer for instance then you need a shopping cart solution.  But it will work for a lot of businesses, and whilst our site isn’t as polished as some, it was achieved for a very low outlay, and we have the ability to change every word in it, add or delete entire pages, insert pictures or even video’s.  That is pretty powerful.

Please leave comments, would love to know your thoughts.