First Experiences With WordPress

My Initial Thoughts On WordPress

I am fairly new at creating websites on the internet.  I just started late last year with no knowledge or experience and I really had no idea where to start.

My primary profession has been selling beauty supplies to salons and I have been with my current company, The Salon Center, for the past three years.  They are a small distributor, with basically no catalog and no website!

Customers kept asking me if we had either one, and out of frustration of having to tell my customers “no” every time.  Without a website,  I just felt like people would not take us seriously until we did.  I decided that I could not wait any longer for the company to build a website.  So, without any prior knowledge, I started researching my options.

I looked at hiring it out, but I did not have the money to pay someone.  Then I started looking at various “predone” websites, but that was not a good option since we needed to have one custom made for our industry.  It would also have to be updated monthly, which could get expensive.

I looked into website software, such as Dreamweaver and those types of programs, and then I remembered I had purchased a program from Costco a couple of years prior, called Serif WebPlus X4.  I installed it to see what it would do, but it was so out of date!  I elected to upgrade it electronically for a small fee and decided to give that a try.

When it loaded, I just sat there staring at the screen.  It looked so complicated and overwhelming!  It looked like a publisher program with tons of options.  Needless to say, I was determined to do this, so I started playing with it and building a page piece by piece.  After working on it for a couple of months, my site started to look good!

I did have a problem getting it on-line, but thankfully Serif’s tech support was there to help.  It was a very functional website and I initially built it for my customers only.  When our management saw it, they showed some interest in purchasing it for the company!  Even though I had to make quite a lot of changes to satisfy the company, it has now been our official company website!  You can see it at http://www.TheSalonCenter.com

I told you all of this to make a point in favor of WordPress.  I recently started looking more into WordPress because it seemed nearly every successful internet marketer has been using this platform, and now I see why.  It is so easy!  You don’t have many worries about formatting the pages, and creating a new page is as simple as clicking “add new”.  Also, with my other website builder, I had to do it on the computer that it was installed on, so if I was away and needed to make changes, it wasn’t happening!

With WordPress, you can log in to your account on any computer, even an ipad!  Granted, it is not as easy to do on an ipad, but it is possible.  What makes this platform so great, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of themes and plugins that you can install on your WordPress platform, which will allow you to change the look and functions without having to do any complex coding!

Just this week, I just added OptimizePress 2.0 to my toolbox!  This is supposed to make things even easier (like creating a web page in minutes)!  I will post more about my ongoing experiences with WordPress in up coming posts.  So please SUBSCRIBE to my blog and share it with others!

‘Til next time!

Rich Rose