So easy a Caveman could…
Uh, ok I won’t go there, but suffice to say WordPress is by far one of the easiest ways a business owner can manage their website content. Providing an intuitive, clean, and straightforward layout design, the ‘Administrator Dashboard’ welcomes users of all skill levels. Not only is it easy to use, but it comes with an entire world (literally) of support if you so choose to leverage it.
Once the WordPress platform is installed, set up and configured, the process of actually updating your website is as easy as logging into the dashboard (which, is located within your website ‘http://www.yourwebsite.com/wordpress/ or something like that) and using the tools native to the WordPress Dashboard. As you can see from the above screenshot of the WordPress Dashboard, the user interface is a very well thought out and intuitive design. In this example, I am creating the very blog post you are reading.
Menu elements provide navigation to different utilities which control multiple aspects of the front and back end of the website. Most importantly, you can see the ‘Posts’ and ‘Pages’ navigation elements. These two areas tend to make up the main content of most small business websites. With these two utilities alone, you can create all of the pages that contain everything about your business as well as maintain an ongoing blog.
The navigation elemets include utilities such as:
- Pages – Where you create and edit the actual pages within your website (i.e. About Us, Services, Contact, etc.).
- Posts – Blog posts displayed in chronological order within a page typically titled ‘Blog’ – you don’t have to call it a Blog, News works too. Users frequently follow website blogs to stay updated with current information. Search engines also like Blogs.
- Users – You create and manage additional users whom you can assign certain tasks and permissions. These users can manage responsibilities like updating the ‘News’ page with new information of an upcoming sale.
- Appearance – For more advanced users, this utility manages the look and feel of the front end of the website. Things like font color/style, logo, background color, etc.
These are just a few of the basic utilities offered within the WordPress dashboard. As you can imagine, the possibilities grow by the day. New utilities are offered as ‘Plugins’ from the worldwide development community supporting WordPress. Stay tuned. We will cover plugins in another article.
At SPC, we are WordPress consultants leveraging the clean, easy to use functionality the WordPress platform offers. This allows us to offer you a low-cost and effective tool for building an online business.
