I’ve recently been hearing more comments on using WordPress to build an entire website. I’ve always kept an ear open for these sort of discussions because my blog is where people will land when they search my key phrases, rather than on my business website (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m one of the top sites in Google for ‘copywriter’).
Well, I’m pleased to announce that The Copywriter’s Crucible is no longer merely a blog but an entire website, with its own individual home page.
I bought the ‘Revolution‘ theme from Brian Gardner (one of the best wordpress designers around as far as I’m concerned), which I’ve customized to reflect my own branding and business requirements.
Now when people arrive looking for a copywriting service they’ll be greeted by a more professional looking home page and (hopefully) won’t immediately click away because they think they’ve been misdirected to an online diary.
Having a WordPress based website offers numerous advantages over something I’d stapled together in Dreamweaver: it’s easier to update, it provides an RSS feed to help drive my marketing, improved SEO, commenting functionality for visitors and an endless supply of plugins to keep it motoring along at peak performance.
I think everybody should, by now, be in agreement that static websites are dated and inadequate for marketing online. With my new template design, I intend to prove why you need a constantly evolving web presence if you want to attract visitors and convert them into customers.
Excellent! Now if you could only do something about your picture on the front page; maybe hire a model or something… 😎
Great tip Matt. This totally changes how I look at using WordPress as a CMS now.
David
Tom – yep, preferably someone who looks a bit older.
David – using WordPress makes it so much easier to keep a website updated and looking fresh. You can upload a new theme and customize it in a day, compared to a week or so (for me anyway) if you had to redesign it from scratch. I think WordPress still need to work on the WYSIWYG editor though, as it’s still a bit fiddly for the non HTML literate, before WordPress can be an easy to use business CMS solution.
Matt.
I am also planning to have a full website with wordpress. Already portfolio page is on the way.
Matt, if you don’t mind me asking, are you doing anything fancy with wordpress to make it into the “CMS” or are you just using the Pages?
All I did was buy Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme [http://www.revolutiontheme.com/] and then customized the pages. The main structure is provided in the theme and then you can add pages as you see fit, WordPress is basically a CMS anyway, the theme just gives it a proper home page as you’d get with a conventional website.
People have been discussing using wordpress to build a site for ages and Brian’s theme is the first I’ve seen to do it properly.
Thanks Matt
I’ve built a couple of WordPress-based sites for clients. I got interested in it after hearing “we wanted to update our site, but our Webmaster never returned our calls” several bazillion times.
For small businesses, static Web sites are anchors.