If you want to make a great first impression with your prospective customers, it requires you to invest in a beautifully designed website and search engine optimization (SEO). Many times, the first interaction your prospects will have with your company is when they search for the specific service or products they need and come across your site in the search result listing. A professional website with well-written marketing copy and great testimonials will prompt a sense of trust and start off your relationship on the right foot.
Your website can be a perfect platform for sharing your knowledge and expertise with alike prospects and customers. Over the years, your clients have been asking the same questions again and again. It’s really helpful when you include those questions along with the answers on your site. This increases your hits within the search engine, as they love websites that provide answers to the questions people are searching on. Interested to learn more about what you’ll need to build a great website? The following are some other essentials.
Get the Training You Need
While WordPress does simplify the process of creating a web presence it’s still important to be knowledgeable about the underlying technologies you will use to create the entire site. As you develop your website, you will need to learn HTML, CSS and PHP. It’s also a good idea to study JavaScript. These markup and programming languages are used to create layout, render text and images for the browser and create customized routines. One of the best ways to get the education you need is to enroll in a college or university program. Technical courses can be expensive, but by taking private student loans you can sign up for the courses you need right away and pay the loan off over time. Private student loans are typically offered by credit unions, banks and finance companies.
WordPress
When you are going to create a comprehensive site for your business, you’ll want to choose a fully functional Content Management System (CMS) as the underlying platform for your development. You will use the CMS to manage and store all of the information for your website. WordPress, which currently powers over one-third of all sites on the Internet, is the proven winner and the best choice in the software category. WordPress was developed using the open-source model and is community supported. Every major hosting company offers WordPress within their client dashboard and many will install it for you when they activate your site. Once it is installed you can begin to sketch out your layout, menu structure, and types of pages you will be creating.
The Best Plugins
WordPress plugins extend the functionality of the site and can also improve performance. Since the plugins are written in PHP you can even create your own using the PHP training you received in your college courses. One of the most popular plugins is Yoast SEO, which you can use to optimize your copy for the best keywords so you will rank higher in the search engines. When the Akismet plugin is activated it will protect you against comment spam. You can install W3 Total Cache to help optimize your performance and reduce the page loading time. For specialized functions, such as creating forms for newsletter signup or customer inquiries, you can choose Contact Form 7 or one of the many other plugins that handle these tasks.
