Valuable Business Software: WordPress / Bluehost Integration

Overview

Freelancers and small businesses prefer WordPress for a good reason. I learned more about website design in three months using WordPress than in the entire seven years at my last job. It is valuable business software in that it encourages proactive marketing. It does not leave all the work to the user, making it user-friendly and helpful to people new to the field.

A WordPress user in front of their computer — A WordPress User

The content manager and search engine optimization tools are beyond anything I was familiar with at my last job, where I was introduced to website design at a small business.

Best Features

Immediately introduces the user to the basic building blocks of website design and marketing by encouraging them to look at SEO, start a mailing list, and integrate social media. This makes website optimization intuitive.

Areas for Improvement

Some of the plugins look complicated to the new user. Expect to spend more than the upfront cost designing your site if you want it to perform well.

Integration

Bluehost made a good decision by integrating WordPress into its site hosting. However, the integration is counterintuitive in some places, causing two site editors to compete for your attention with each advertising SEO tools, themes, and mail management software. At present, I manage my site in WordPress and let Bluehost manage the hosting.

Themes

All website design software will have these. They are meant as templates to design a site, and a well-designed theme should support, not limit, the design options of the user. WordPress themes are all good in that they easily adapt to the user, integrate any type of content and allow many layout options.

Plugins

Plugins Overview

Expect to spend more than the initial cost of setting up a site on plugins. To put up a few pages is one thing; to start an email list, sell products, and gain a following is quite another. Plugins that optimize for the search engine, manage your email, and sell your products are valuable, and totally essential, for improving a site’s performance. No website design software is complete without them, but some site managers allow you go go through the entire process without ever being aware of their existence.

WordPress immediately introduces the user to the nuts and bolts of your site’s design and web integration. They immediately bring your attention to numerous and various plugins to improve the site’s functionality and performance. The Bluehost/WordPress integration does a good job of bringing them to the user’s attention quickly. Over the first two weeks of site development, a number of relevant plugins come up for you. WordPress has done a good job of recommending the most essential and effective plugins to improve site performance.

Recommended Plugins

I recommend one of the SEO tools Yoast or AIOSEO, as it is crucial to make your website findable. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo rely on metrics known to these plugins to find your site. At my last company, the site design software we used did not have an SEO plugin or try to sell me one. This means we could put out a site that had no ability to crawl up in the search results. Over the course of seven years, I was sad to say our business slowed to a halt.

I also recommend an insights plugin help you improve your marketing performance in attracting visitors. Also, site security such as Jetpack are essential to remove spam comments and back up the site. Also consider starting an email list when you begin writing your blog; it is very important that people know that your business is still active.

Ease of Use

The WordPress site editor is designed well. It appears clunky at first, but this is actually due to greater inclusion of multiple user’s needs. I can easily add content such as pages, posts and reusable blocks to my site. If that content needs later editing, it is easy to locate the post that needs work. The integration of marketing tools is superior in that they blend into the design of the site. They, too are easy to locate when using WordPress.