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 to what content is on it) than the default one. You can find free Wordpress themes that are business oriented to start with, and customize them with your company logo and colours, or you can hire a professional designer to create one specially for your company. This depends on your budget, but make sure to select a theme that has good HTML markup and is Search Engine friendly to improve the chances of visitors finding you through search engines.
Once you know what you want in your site, is time to actually implement it on Wordpress. Wordpress has two types of pages, blog articles which are organized chronologically, dated and usually accept comments and static pages. To use Wordpress as a CMS you're mainly going to use static pages, though if you want to incorporate a blog you can do that as well by posting all your articles within a Blog subsection.
To create a static page in Wordpress you need to log-in into the admin section of the site (you will find it on the sub-directory wp-admin) with the login and password provided during installation. On the left hand menu you will see a section called "Pages". There you can edit or add new static pages to your Wordpress website. Clicking on "Add new" will send you to a form, where you can insert the page content. First give the page a title, and edit the permalink if you are not happy with the one Wordpress suggests for it, and write the content for your page. You probably want to disable comments and ping-backs (notifications of other people linking to your page) on your static pages, to make it look as little a blog as possible. On the right hand menu there's an option to select the Parent of this page (That will be the main page under which the one you're writing will nest). For example, you can have an About page with a brief introduction to your company, then write a "Our Goals" page that nests under it with your company goals. Depending on the template you're using it will display as a section and a subsection on the navigation menus. You can order your pages in a different order as to when they were written, by changing the Order value on the right hand menus. Also, you can use a different template (If your theme allows) for pages within different categories (For example, different colours for different products types).
If you are ready to publish it, you can publish it immediately. Otherwise you can save it as a draft to keep on working on it later, or schedule a publication date for it to become visible for the users automatically on that date.
Do this for all the pages you had planned for your website, and you will have a full business website that you can manage yourself without technical support and has user friendly URLs that will help your rankings on the search engines as well.