by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: July 25, 2009

Wordpress is best known as one of the leading open source free blogging platforms, but it can also be used as a great CMS to create and keep updated your business website. Using a CMS (Content Management System) is an easy way to have a business site ready in a fraction of the time it would take for a custom one, and also gives you full control over the content (so you can add more, or edit the existing pages) without having to contact a technically oriented person. Wordpress also offers you the possibility of customizing the URLs of your pages, to make them as user friendly as possible and gain points with the most popular search engines. With the right theme it can be a powerful and free marketing tool for your business.

First of all, you will probably want to install Wordpress in your own hosting, so you can use your existing business domain. Since it goes beyond the scope of this article, you can read this one about how to install wordpress in your own hosting. Also, you need to do some work deciding what pages are going to compose your site, and how are they going to be organized. Usually users don't go deeper than three levels inside a site unless they're very interested, so try to keep your pages organized in no more than two levels. Also, a navigation bar full of items can be confused, so it's recommended that you keep to less than 7 main sections. Generally, an index page (the page where the user will land when typing your domain name on their browser, also known as home page) should be the first one of them. Other "must haves" are:
- About us page, where you can talk about your company, employees, leadership, etc... in different subsections
- Contact us page with all the ways you want your customers to contact you, geographical location, even a google map of your office location. Also, is recommended to use a contact form to make it as easy as possible and fool spammers that would harvest your email address and fill your inbox if you were to just display your email address.
- News page. You can use Wordpress blogging format for this one, and post updated about your company and products, or you can use it to display your press releases.
- A Testimonials page with quotes from happy customers.
- A Services/Products section with a list of what you're offering, maybe organized in different subsections. Lately some companies are using the word "Solutions" for this section.

You might also want to select a different Theme (This defines how the page looks, as opposed

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