
Last week, we started talking about your first company website, covering the basics like choosing the right domain and installing WordPress. This week, we continue along this theme, taking a quick look at some of the other things that you’ll need to get your first company website up and running.
As we’ve mentioned before, WordPress is a great content management system that can be used for more than just blogs. If you are using it for a company website, it might be best to set it up to appear like a static website. With most blogs, the most recent post is what appears on the front page, but for a company website, you can set up an index page and have that always appear as the first page.
To do this, log into the administration area of your WordPress site, and then click on Options in the navigation near the top. When the sub-menu appears, click on Reading. Right at the top of this page will be where you can choose what to display as your site’s front page. Most blogs will have the first option — recent posts — selected, but for the purposes of your company blog, you may want to select the second option: a static page. From here, you’ll be able to select a page that you have already written through the “Write” tool. Note that this says static page and not post. When you enter the Write tool, be sure to write a page and not a post.
After you have this set up, you’ll want to consider what other pages you’d like to have on your company website. Common pages that you should implement include contact information, FAQ, product descriptions, and an About page. It’s totally up to you how much (or how little) you want to include. You may want to consider a freelance writer to help you with the website content, but that’s totally up to you as well.
One major element that you should spend some time considering is the header image. Your company logo should feature prominently and your header image should be unique enough that people will be able to differentiate it from competing websites and businesses. A freelance web designer can help you come up with a great header image. Look for them on sites like Digital Point and Pixish.
Bear in mind that a WordPress-powered company website may not be the best solution for e-commerce. It is perhaps better suited as a source of information about your company and what it has to offer. Online shopping cart solutions can be a bit pricier.





ssmilin
March 21, 2008 4:43 pm
Hi I’m researching web editors to put together my 1st page site on bluefur, and I checked out wordpress, seems ok but I found webjam and thought I might go with that. What do you think?