The internet. The future frontier. Actually, it’s the current frontier. And though many organizations realize the potential of the internet, they have no idea how to capitalize on its possibilities, so they sit with watering mouths in front of a computer screen and wonder where to start.
The answer is different for every organization, because the first step is to figure out exactly what features you will need, much like buying a phone. Do you want a camera? Full keyboard? A shiny pink exterior? It’s the same. Do you have any use for a blog? Picture galleries? Podcasts?
Many small business owners are under the assumption that they need a Facebook page for their company, and immediately. And usually, that’s not the case. If the interested party is a band – yes. Facebook it up. MySpace, too. It’s perfect for them because much of their initial success depends on how well they can pressure their friends into attending their shows. But for most other purposes, I would suggest an actual website, generally with a blog sewn in somewhere. The problem with Facebook is that it is difficult to get all the information you need about a company on there, and everything is in a pretty rigid format. Plus, people who don’t have Facebook accounts won’t even bother trying to access your information.
So a website. You can lay it out however you want and include just about everything you would if you were using Facebook. You want photo albums? You got it. Get yourself a Flickr account. Wanna post updates every day? Well that’s just great. In fact, why not start a blog? If you want to keep directing traffic back to this awesome new site, you’ll need content that changes regularly, because no one is going to read the same stuff over and over. A blog is perfect for that.
But hey – isn’t building a website super hard and super expensive?
I’m glad you asked! It’s actually crazy simple with WordPress, and you can do it yourself for zero dollars. Of course you can shell out some bucks if you want to get fancy (a .com domain costs a little something, but not much with GoDaddy.)
So if you’re convinced it’s a website you need, think of a fancy handle (username) and title for your website/blog and read on to the next entry, Getting Started With WordPress.
