As one of the leading content management systems in the world, WordPress offers any aspiring website entrepreneur the ability to easily draft, publish, and update content. Additionally, it allows site administrators to manage every aspect of an online blog or business. Because it is absolutely free to use, it is obviously the most affordable solution for any entrepreneur attempting to build an online brand and reach a potential market. Finally, it is easy to use and available as a plugin on any web host, making it the foremost, turn-key website resource for anyone of meager or advanced online skills.

As with any website, creating a page is the primary way to deliver information to people seeking said information. These pages are designed to look good on a rectangular screen of varying sizes, and the textual information that dominates a page is often interspersed with calls to action, advertisements, and video. If you are good with graphic design, you can make your own page. If you are not good with graphic design, you should use what is known as a page builder because it utilizes a grid system that allows you to plug visual and informational components into a single page. It also manages white space via a variety of methods. Spacers, for instance, allow you to add space between two components. A page builder will also allow you to create evenly spaced columns. Finally, it can increase padding and margins around components, which will keep the page from appearing cramped. If you can find a web designer proficient with a page builder, you are guaranteed to end up with a sophisticated site that seizes the attention of readers and viewers. In addition to managing the appearance of the page, a page-building plugin allows you to add the following to your site. – sophisticated banners – multi-media – forms and surveys via short codes – raw HTML – fancy boxes with borders and icons – galleries – testimonials – FAQ sections – price grids and columns One of the best functions of any page-building plugin is the ability to save user templates. For instance, once you design a page that you like, you can save this design into your user templates. When it is time to add more content, all you have to do is load the pre-saved user template of your choice, and the loaded page will already be designed to match previously published pages. This type of functionality is especially important for someone wanting to maintain a coherent look to help grow brand awareness. Simply put, building pages is the key to saving time and building sites that convert traffic into sales or dedicated readers. If you can learn the ins and outs of building pages or find a designer proficient with the best way to build pages, you are well on your way to being able to dominate your particular industry or market.

Designing anything from scratch can be both tedious and difficult, so templates are an important component when you are proposing any new website. Templates offer you the ability to build your business within the context of a coherent theme, which will help you immediately achieve a singular brand. Moreover, a template allows you to easily adjust the appearance of your website for a look that best fits your entrepreneurial vision. For instance, a template allows you to make the following global and page-based adjustments. – menus that are set on the left or right column – main menus with social icons – header and footer adjustments – blog appearance: traditional versus grid – multi-page options versus an endless page Additionally, most templates are responsive, which enables them to look good on a variety of computers, tablets, or phones. The best templates are also optimized for speed, which helps your website load faster. Having pages that load in under two seconds will help you retain visitors because everyone knows the online market has no patience for slow sites. Additionally, search engines rank quick sites somewhat higher than notoriously slow sites, so you will have a better chance at ranking high on the first page of a customer’s search results. Finally, templates allow you to maintain a secure website. Every time a CMS upgrades for security reasons, the template’s maker will often issue a compatible upgrade to ensure it remains secure. Finding the right template can be as easy as conducting a search for “web design CMS” via your favorite search engine. Of course, finding a design company proficient with web design is the easiest way to get your business going because your designer can quickly create a site with all the right adjustments.

Any type of website cannot simply rely on text-based information. In fact, many of the top SEO experts recommend a blend of text, images, and video. Text should be used in a variety of fashions that take advantage of headers, titles, and paragraphs. Text should also be used in the captions of videos to convey information. Content managers are proficient at displaying images in ways that grab attention. For instance, you can set them to load with a brief animation. Additionally, you can add borders to them or set them to scroll at different speeds from the rest of the page, a process known as parallax scrolling. In terms of video, content managers work seamlessly with YouTube and other video repositories. To add a video to your site, all you simply have to do is to cut and paste the share link into your content, and the video will automatically appear on the page. Making video sharing even easier, content managers allow you to build video galleries and playlists. For a special effect, you can also set a video as a background to help emphasize the text, which you can align to the foreground.

Whether you are wanting to build the next go-to blog or develop a new site dedicated to online retail, you will need to publish content. Content, of course, is a catch-all phrase used to describe the following types of information. – articles – products – FAQ – surveys and quizzes – videos – infographics – portfolios or galleries The best thing about content managers is that they help you easily draft your content in the content editor. Once drafted, you can schedule it for publication by setting a date, or you can leave it in draft mode for later review. Once it is ready for publication, all you have to do is click the “publish” button, and it will be ready for viewing on your website. In addition to helping administrators develop and publish new content, content managers allow you to setup a community in which users can write and publish their own content. Doing so allows your website to thrive without the need for one administrator to review and publish each and every item. Moreover, via the aforementioned plugins, content mangers allow you to distribute content to such social sites as Facebook, YouTube or Instagram. Having the ability to publish content from one central hub allows you to reach readers easily on the online venues of their choice. Of course, another component of publishing content is editing, and content managers offer the ability for administrators to assign roles to various workers or colleagues. For instance, you can assign someone the role of editor, allowing that person to see the works of other people and edit them. Once edited, these articles can be saved for a publisher who might give the content one final review prior to publishing it. Such roles allows you to streamline the publishing process by having distinct roles assigned to users whose expertise match those specific roles, and this becomes important when you want to have top-tier content that passes all your internal quality control.

Taking orders is not possible with just any website, but content managers handle this process very effectively with the right plugins. Various commercial plugins, for instance, offer you the instant ability to sell products and ship them. Unlike purely informational plugins, commercial plugins empower content managers with the following functionality. – attractive display of products and services – ability to adjust fees for shipping and tax – offer custom options on products and services – inventory tracking – sales and promotional management – ability to work with third-party social sites like Facebook – create customer-satisfaction surveys – track cookies for affiliate sales – assign payment for affiliates – utilize affiliate codes from sites like Amazon – compile reports or sales statistics – work with third-party payment processors for better data encryption

No matter how diligent you might be, something eventually goes wrong, and if you do not have your online data backed up, you might lose information or be required to waste a lot of time manually recreating it. Content managers, however, allow you to easily backup your website in such a way that if your site is hacked or if something goes wrong with your web host, you can reinstall the system and then upload your pages, posts, and galleries via their backup files. When it comes to backups, content managers can be equipped with third-party plugins that create backups automatically. However, you can also easily backup your data via the dashboard. Once the files are uploaded, they will then be automatically re-published. By backing up the data via a content manager, you help turn a disaster into a minor administrative task.

Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the best ways to reach potential readers or customers. This type of optimization is known as SEO, and it is the key to letting search engines know whether your content matches the keywords of online searches. When it comes to SEO, content managers are equipped to easily help you design your content with a variety of HTML tags that help search engines parse content and identify the subject matter. For instance, via the page editor, you can select content and assign it as a title or a header. Doing so will wrap that content with an H1 tag or H2 tag, respectively. Other content tags include H3, H4, and H5 tags. You can also easily link to other pages on your site or to external sites by adding a URL tag to keywords or phrases. Doing this manually by editing the HTML can be tedious and hard to complete without creating a multitude of typos. However, content managers allow you to simply select a keyword or keyword phrase and assign it with a link. Finally, content managers allow you to also include metadata on text, pictures, or videos. This type of information is not readily visible to casual surfers. Instead, it is information that is coded into the HTML where search engines know to look. Completing this type of SEO task is notoriously tedious for anyone, but the average user can accomplish this easily via the content manager’s content editor.

Creating and publishing your own site can be rewarding, but if you are like many people who want to run a business, you know that a design company versed in design and content managers will help you save time and maximize revenue by pointing you toward or equipping your site with the right plugins.  Additionally, such a company can often keep you abreast of updates or additional services to help you maximize your ROI. The important thing to keep in mind is the company must know the ins and outs of a content manager because as easy as they are to use, they can be intricate. Teaming up with an expert in content managers is the best way to ensure your site does not exclude one single thing.