WordPress for small and medium businesses

Introduction

WordPress is an excellent platform for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Recently I had the opportunity of constructing the home page for a small business. I will share my experience in this blog post.

After working as I.T manager for a small business for a few years, I realized how important requirements are to the company. Requirements that seem insignificant to a technical person can be a matter of life and death for the company.

Its very important for the I.T support person to ensure company requirements are correctly and completely fulfilled. SMBs tend live on a day to day bases. Unlike large companies, SMBs have small capital and have to fight for survival. I.T support for SMBs needs to be alert and focused on the company requirements. Also the management of SMBs usually are not interested in technical concerns of I.T people. They just want the job done.

I.T Requirements of SMB’s

As web master for a SMB, I have learned that the company requirements tend to be very focused. At first the requirements seem very simple and can easily put off an “educated” I.T worker. However these requirements are very specific and meeting them correctly is no small task.

The home page for a SMB represents the SMB on the internet. It needs to have following features:

• It should present the company’s work clearly
• It should promote the company’s services and products
• It needs to take advantage of business promotion features available on the internet, such as those provided by Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin
• It needs to be easy to manage. For example adding new features to the Home Page should be easy

In my opinion, the most important feature of the home page is that it needs to be easy to manage. For this reason WordPress is my platform of choice for home page for a SMB.

Why use WordPress

WordPress is not only easy to administer, but it can also be extended easily. It has a large number of website themes to choose from. New features can be easily added as plugins. WordPress supports thousands of plugins. Some of the WordPress plugins I found useful are:

• Slideshow Gallery plugin, for presenting product and service images attractively.
• Making contact forms with WordPress is easy with the help of plugins such as Contact Form 7.
• If you need to post your WordPress articles on social networks easily, you can use NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster plugin.
• If you want to make it easy for your website visitors to share information about your website, you can use the Shareaholic | share buttons, analytics, related content plugin.
• WordPress also has some nice plugins for web masters such as WP Slimstat, WordPress SEO and Wordfence Security.

It can be easy to get carried away with the large number of WordPress features. WordPress has plugins for just about any purpose. You can get lost trying to find the plugin that meets the actual requirement. Its important to stay focused on the task at hand and not experiment with different plugins.

For a SMB website, its more important to just get the job done correctly. One may question the benefit of having thousands of plugins to choose from. I think WordPress has many great features but not all of them are suitable for a SMB website.

Conclusion

I think being easy to manage and update is the best feature of WordPress for SMBs. Having thousands of plugins and themes and being easy to customize is great but more suitable for custom applications instead of simple web sites for SMBs.