Control Your Own Site Using WordPress

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Phyllis Zimbler Miller.  Phyllis has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing.  Her company now has a collaboration with Doron Orenstein of Magnetic Webworks who builds WordPress websites for clients and Miller Mosaic provides social media coaching for those clients.

Grateful for WordPress

When I first started Internet marketing I hired a web person to create four different sites for me.  And with each site, although there was some content management, I was very frustrated that I had to wait for – and pay – the web person for minor changes.

That’s when I first heard about WordPress websites.  Of course, when I first heard about these I didn’t know the difference between the hosted ones at WordPress.com and the self-hosted ones using WordPress.org (usually referred to as just WordPress).

But when my younger daughter Yael K. Miller joined with me to create the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing, I told Yael we had to learn about having WordPress websites that we could control ourselves.

Yael dove into this project, including choosing Thesis for our sites’ theme, and soon she could build our own sites.  At that point I walked away from the four sites I had paid a great deal for and never looked back.

Building WordPress Sites for Others

And then we started building WordPress websites for clients because we wanted others to enjoy the power of controlling one’s own sites the way we did.

Now the truth is that, unless you are a techie person, it is probably a very good idea to have someone else build out your WordPress site.  There are many backend steps that are very important for search engine optimization and other purposes.

Plus, before you have a WordPress site built for you, it’s important to have decided on your Unique Selling Proposition – your USP – your brand.  In other words, how you want to position what you are offering on your site/blog.  This is especially important in choosing the domain name for your site.

For example, Yael and I worked with nonfiction authors who we encouraged not to use the book’s title for their website URL.  Instead we worked with these authors to come up with domain names that included the “promise” of what the book offered readers.

Now we do remind our clients that it is important to update their WordPress websites – and this means both updating WordPress as well as updating Thesis.  This is a task that can get overlooked but should be carried out.

I have to admit that, every time I make a change on one of our websites, I still get a thrill at being able to do things myself without being a techie.  I love being in control of my own destiny.

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Tagged as: web design, wordpress