WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home”

Today WordPress is one of the most popular website tools available. Many people are still not aware of its powerful content management system and continue to use only the basic features offered. WordPress can actually be used for more than just blogging. With WordPress you can build a nice professional site that is easy to update. You can even setup a page for a blog that can be fed to your favorite social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIN, so you can promote your business and bring new customers to your website. This website is built upon WordPress.

WordPress is a good choice for small business websites as it is very simple to configure and use for your small business. Using WordPress as a content management system tool can help you to handle keeping your information up to date on your web pages. WordPress is amazingly user friendly and an economical system. The best part about WordPress that its an ideal choice for a small business looking for an easy and inexpensive way to manage a website.

You can use your WordPress website not only to educate your customers on your business, but also to get them to educate you. A WordPress website with the use of custom forms can easily be setup to help you gather marketing information, provide feedback, and tell you what you need to know about your customers’ needs, so as a business you can serve them better. Being able to edit and update your own website you will be able to establish a place for your small business and you can then sit back and watch it grow and flourish.

How Much Does WordPress Really Cost?

I saw an article recently listing 10 free web site building tools. Most of them take a while to figure out. They won’t all let you do what you want to do. None were expandable to your own site if you ever wanted to take the next step, from “free” to “owning your own”. It made me think about what the real costs of a web platform are.

The Largest Cost Is Time.

How long does it take you to learn how to work it and make it do what you want it to do? How much is it going to frustrate you and make you figure out how to do something simple? In my experience with WordPress, it’s much easier and intuitive to learn to use WordPress than with any other platform out there. When I build a site for a client using WordPress, it’s much easier to train them and get them up to speed on WordPress than other systems that I’ve tried.

The Real, Hard Costs

Let’s look at the cost it would take to put a WordPress site on your own server and run it for a year. Domain name is $15. Don’t pay more than that for a domain name. Hosting packages can be had for less than $100 a year. Call the whole thing $115 for a year of hosting your own site. If you use a good host, they would have an auto install version of WordPress. Click, click, bang. It’s set up. Play with a theme. Download, install. Play with plug ins. Download, install. Write a few posts. Create a few pages. Change the layout a bit. Call it 8 hours total, from start to having your own blog on line, working, with your own theme and content. You have added the plug-ins that you wanted, the theme that you wanted, the layout, the content, the menu. All of it is exactly what you want.

The Price Of Choice

The cost in time is really because you have TOO MANY options. If you can be satisfied with what comes out of the box, then a WordPress site can be set up in 20 minutes.

Other Free Hosting Options

Compare that to another free host. Set up is quick and easy. Pick a theme. There are only 20. Write a post. Change the layout? No. Can’t do that. Put the menu on the other side? No. Can’t do that. You want to post video? No. Can’t do that either. Podcast? Special functionality? Nope. None of that.

The Cost Of Free

You’ve spent the same 8 hours trying to do stuff and not being able to that you would have on WordPress. The other free host is $100 cheaper and maybe that’s the difference for you. It doesn’t look quite like you want it to and it doesn’t have quite the right functionality. It’s harder to use and takes longer to post than WordPress. If it takes 3 minutes longer and you make 20 posts, that’s an hour. How many posts in a year?

Time Is Money

Which is a better deal? How much is your time worth? How much money do you have? It’s all up to you, but if you have $100 to spend on a web site for a year, spend it on building a WordPress site. You’ll thank me at the end of the year.