I’ve been setting up websites and providing web hosting for many years now. I began doing it just for myself and then when clients mentioned the dismal service they were getting from other webhosts, I began to take over their hosting as well.  Today I have two servers, one in Australia and one in the US, both have good uptimes and I have little problems with them. I have a small team of IT/programmers in the background who assist with the more technical stuff and they allow me to get on with setting up new accounts, setting up webspaces and getting the websites created and uploaded.

When I first began working on websites in 1996 it was with Microsoft’s Frontpage (now superceded by other programs) and I used that for several years.  In 1999 I took on a 6 month intraweb database project with a company supporting a hospital group that required the work to be done in Dreamweaver, so I spent time learning that and teaching some of my Virtual Assistant team as well, so we could manage that project.  I continued to use Dreamweaver, with Frontpage occasionally till around 2007 when I realised that the blogging software, WordPress, that I had been using for 3 years, was capable of creating CMS (Content Management Style) sites.

WordPress has moved forward in leaps and bounds and is now my program of choice, along with tens of thousands of other web designers.  What many still don’t realise is that WordPress is a free program.  You can get the community based free WordPress at wordpress.com but it is important to understand that it is not meant for business use, but rather for other things, hobbies, personal use, community projects and so on.

If you pay for webhosting many hosts now have WordPress available as part of the package. WordPress itself is free and can be downloaded from wordpress.org where there is also a great forum and community of users, ready to help you when you have a need.  So, even if your webhost doesn’t provide it you could install the package quite easily yourself, or with assistance.

My own webhosting facilities has cpanel, where you can set up email addresses, track the stats for your website and a number of other tools, and Fantastico which has a number of open-source software programs available including WordPress.  What I love about WordPress is its ease of use – for beginners and those more advanced.  Almost anyone could set up a WordPress site in a couple of hours or more.  It’s knowing how to edit and tweak the templates and make the best use of the other facilities available, that helps make a site look different from the many other thousands that are out there.  And once it is set up, the marriage between search engines and WordPress makes it the perfect tool for Search Engine Optimsation (SEO) and ensuring that your website is noticed by the search engines out there.

I’ll continue writing about aspects of using WordPress for website design so stay tuned!

Dandenong-Ranges-Photography.com.au  Photography site and blog. Recently upgraded to StudioPress theme Lifestyle.  Do you like this look? I can do one for you too – your choice of colours.