WordPress Solutions

Problem: Friend needs a website – Solution: WordPress

By David North ⋅ March 13, 2009 ⋅

Last week a friend called me and she said that she was having trouble getting work done on the website she uses to promote her business. She sounded pretty frustrated, so I told her to stop by my office and we could visit about it.

She came by and shared with me the problems she was having getting her web site updated. The guy that she had contracted to support her website just never had time to add the things she wanted. It was time to renew the annual hosting and she needed some advice on what to do.

We talked a minute about her web site. I ask her who she was trying to communicate to with her web site and what she wanted the visitors to the site to do when they came. We walked through the pages of her existing site. We talked about what it communicated about her business. I wanted to understand what it was that she wanted and her business needed. She really just wanted to update the text, add a few new product listings and have a way for her customers to place orders online with a credit card.

What she wanted was pretty reasonable, but she couldn’t get the guy she was paying to do the work. Now to be fair, she wasn’t paying him that much for annual support. However, if he needed to be paid more to do the work he should have asked her for it instead of just dragging his feet.

I was pretty happy to tell her I thought I could solve her problem. How did free, fast, and all the things she wanted sound? She was thrilled at the prospect.

It was a case of WordPress to the rescue. In less than a week, working in the evenings, I had a new WordPress based web site set up with my hosting site (Blue Host). I used Artisteer to build a simple theme that would represent her business well, and I set up an online shopping cart with eShop and PayPal.

I got to review the new site with her this week and she and her partner really liked it. She is excited about the blogging feature that will allow her to share how to use her products and help with being found in the search engines. Next week , I hope teach her how to use the WordPress admin pages to create posts and update pages so she can maintain the site herself.

I was pretty happy that I had an answer for her. WordPress makes it possible to do things that, at least for me, were not easy in the past. Here is why WordPress was a good solution:

It was free.
It was quick to implement. It didn’t take much time to install and create a new web site.
It is user maintainable. Once it is set up, the users can easily make updates to it and I don’t have to.
It has the common functions available that most individuals and business need, in this case a shopping cart and payment mechanism.

I can remember a time when my consulting company would have taken several months and charged ten grand or more for a web site like this and even more if we built the pages that would allow the users to maintain it themselves.

It is great when technology lets us solve a problem for someone in a quick and cost effective way. That is what technology should be all about. In this case it help me put a smile on my friend’s face. What does WordPress let you do?