Http://LeonardSipes.Com and Http://MyLifeAudio.Com
I belong to a group of webmasters and content creators via e-mail and they drive me nuts; 80 to 90 percent of their conversations are technical in nature.
What we NEED are discussions about creating the best possible content; the best articles, audio, video and other methods of communication.
Social media IS content creation. Content DRIVES discussions. Content POWERS Facebook, Twitter and the other social platforms.
Research from Marketing Charts clearly states that business see search engine optimization as primarily a process of content creation.
If all this is true, they why is there so little conversation about the heart and soul of internet conversations?
Websites are time consuming monsters that suck up most of the conversation and energy of staff.
My Solution:
My solution? Switch to WordPress.Com
WordPress is the largest provider of free websites/blogs in the world. They have a wonderful reputation and offer an incredible array of services. I favor WordPress for simplicity and the fact that no one offers as many free services.
WordPress.Com is on autopilot; it basically runs itself.
O-my-god, whatever will we do with all that time that WordPress.Com provides? Possibly create some killer content?
Most Know WordPress as Two Sections; WordPress.Com and WordPress.Org:
WordPress.Com
For prior visitors, WordPress.Com IS NOT the service you thought you knew. WordPress.Com is CONSTANTLY improving . It’s now packed with options that were only available through other platforms or WordPress.Org.
WordPress.Com (http://wordpress.com/) is maintained for free and the website address (known as a domain name) is also free. However, you can purchase your own dot com website address.
They also provide an array of free themes to give your site a unique look. You can now buy premium (paid) themes although the free themes suffice for many.
You never have to worry about buying bandwidth or maintaining or updating your site. WordPress.Com does all that for you at no charge. Your site will never crash or become infected. You don’t have to back it up.
Note that WordPress.com can put ads to your website or blog and you have no control over the contents of those ads. It’s how they make money.
You can pay a fee to WordPress.com to keep ads off the site.
WordPress.Com allows voice recordings for $20.00 per year.
A powerful plugin and storage for video is also available for $60.00 a year.
There are premium and additional services that give you an ad free experience and provide audio and video capacity.
We used to know WordPress.Com as simply a free blogging platform with very limited options. Those days are over. If I had to start my personal websites from scratch, I would use WordPress.Com instead of WordPress.Org.
WordPress.Com is also reaching out to government agencies and inviting them in. It’s time for us to listen to what they have to say.
WordPress.Org
WordPress.org (http://wordpress.org/) is different from WordPress.Com. WordPress.Org gives you more freedom to do what you want with your site. The bottom line is appearance and services for those who come to the site. This site uses WordPress.Org.
The principal freedom is choosing from a vast array of free or paid themes (themes are the structures of websites–like the frame of a house).
We employ a paid theme for this and other websites that is remarkable in its stability, usefulness and flexibility. I compare a paid theme to driving a luxury automobile with a five-star crash rating instead of driving a lesser vehicle.
Both will get you to your destination but one will be safer and add many additional features.
You also have the option to incorporate a “skin” over your paid theme that turns your site from a blog to a professional looking website. Creating a great looking website can cost $3,000 to $5,000 and up. Incorporating a skin can reduce those charges to a couple hundred dollars for the cost of the theme, skin and professional installation.
Most professionals in the internet community recommend that you “own” your own address (known as a domain name) and you create a website where you have complete control over all content and how the site looks.
With WordPress.Org, you have to purchase the address of your website from WordPress or someone else (you rent website addresses-you don’t own them). When I created my sites, I purchased (actually rented) the address. If you don’t keep the payments up, you have the probability of losing your address to someone else.
Your site becomes your reputation—it becomes your public relations operation. If your site is the very embodiment of you are, wouldn’t you want complete control over everything that appears on your website or blog?
But WordPress.Org comes with challenges as well as opportunities:
You also have to buy the power to keep the site operating (known as bandwidth). The good news is that the cost of bandwidth has dropped remarkably over the last ten years. You can operate your on site for as little as $7.00 a month.
You also have to do some maintenance on your website. Principally this involves updating software (fairly easy). But note that I had a website using a free theme crash and become unusable when I updated plug-ins (software packages that add capacity).
Now I use a paid theme that has the strength to resist crashes. Note that I caused a site to crash when I switched the domain name. I had to start completely over. I also had a problem that caused me to use VaultPress, a paid service from WordPress that backs up your site and tells you if you have security issues.
WordPress.Org gives anyone who wants to create their own website and blog the power to do so and have complete control over how the site looks and acts. It comes with challenges (listed above) but it can’t be beat for what it does; it allows you to communicate with the world in a very professional manner.
It also provides this service at a tiny fraction of the costs to operate a website ten years ago.
Bottom-line:
Yes, I sing the praises of both forms of WordPress but the bottom-line is that WordPress.Com now comes with so many features and extras at a very reasonable cost that if I had to it over again, I would have use it instead of WordPress.Org.
Like everyone else in the social media world, the time taken to update and deal with crashes and multiple other issues could have been spent on creating content.
And in the final analysis, great content is what makes or breaks you in the internet world.
Anything else is just an unnecessary distraction.
Books:
There are lots of books available on the WordPress experience and I recommend “Wordpress for Dummies.” Yes, the title’s a bit insulting but the book is instructive especially for those new to websites and blogging. It’s available via Amazon and many additional sites.
Best, Len.
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