It depends on what you want for your website.  Free and simple or fabulous and advanced?

www.WordPress.com 

Pros:

• Free
• No technical knowledge required
• Takes care of spam for you
• Takes care of SEO* for you

Cons:

• Limited theme designs
• Limited widget features
• Bad for SEO (WordPress takes the credit instead of you)

 www.WordPress.org

Pros:

• Install a fabulous theme
• Unlimited widget feature plugins
• Lots more control
• You take credit for SEO

Cons:

• More expensive ($70-$500)
• Technical know-how required
• You take care of spam
• You take care of SEO

Please note that you will be able to manage both using the user-friendly wordpress admin panel without any technical requirements.  In other words, once your web designer sets your websites up, you will be able to easily write a post, edit it, add an image, post a video, etc. the same way you did with your free blog.

This is one of the most frequent questions I get these days.

Sounds like a simple question, but it can get really confusing and complicated.  If you’re willing to fork in some money and time, you should be able to do it in no time.

But first, you have to decide what type of blog you are looking for.  Study the breakdown before you plunge in.

Ok, now that you decided, if you still want to go with www.WordPress.org, then follow these steps:

1. Buy the domain name (ex. from www.1and1.com). (~$8)
2. Buy web hosting** from someone like www.bluehost.com. (~$100/year or less)
3. Choose a wordpress theme.  Just google it and you will find tons. (free or up to $50)
4. Install your wordpress theme onto your website and customize it. (Technical knowledge required*** – free or up to $80-$300 depending on the complexity of your website and customization)
5. Customize your website.
6. Install all the plugins you want, especially Askimet and SEO all-in-one. 

Example of a wordpress.com blog: www.greekmuslim.wordpress.com.

Example of a wordpress.org blog: www.greeksrethink.com

Footnotes:

*Search engine optimization – ex. how high your page appears in google searches.

**You can get a free domain name from your web hosting company but you have more control if you buy it separately from another company, in case you don’t like your web hosting company, it’s easy to switch and they don’t lock you in.

*** If you don’t know what you are doing, here’s some golden advice that will save you loads of money and tme.  Instead of spending 50 hours trying to figure it out (and in the end, your site looks crappy), just hire a web designer to do it and use those hours to make money for your project.  I know you might be cringing right now because most likely you are on a very low budget, but I go through this process all the time with so many people and in the end, they are exasperated by the experience and go to a web designer for help anyway, so why not just skip that frustration?

If you want to learn how to make vidoes or media for your business, here’s a great program to sign up to:

www.messagemastery.com

You can check out their video on their website.

We all know that if you don’t rank on the first page in Google searches, most likely many surfers are not going to find your website, but how do you get on the first page of Google?

Search Engine Optimization 101

Well, there are lots of ways to do it that require hard work, but I’ll give you the first SEO 101 tip.  By the way, SEO stands for search engine optimization – in other words, ranking high on Google (and other) search.

The title tag

If you visit, let’s say www.bravenet.com, at the bottom of your computer, the bravenet tab will read, “Web Hosting, Free W” and you can’t read the rest.  Notice that it doesn’t read “bravenet”.  This is because they are taking advantage of the title tag to get ranked high on Google searches.

SEO’s first trick

How did they do that? Here, I’ll show you. On the bravenet’s site, at the top, click on View/Source.  Scroll down a bit and you should see:

 <title>Web Hosting, Free Web Hosting and Web Tools from Bravenet.com.</title> 

That’s their title tag. 

Why did they use that title?

Because, those are the keywords they know people are searching for to get to their site (and their competitiors’). 

So, what happens if my website doesn’t have a title tag? 

You might end up on the 17th page of a google search, like my friend did!  Have you ever clicked through all the way to the 17th page to find a website?  Most likely not! Well, I have, but that’s another story.

So, how do I get a title tag on my website?

Simply, just let your web designer know to add one.  Or, if you are looking for web designers, search for ones that offer SEO packages too.  It’s well worth it. Don’t end up like my friend who ended up on the 17th page!!

Go ahead and type in a keyword in Google to find your website.  How high do you rank on Google?

 (The photo is fuzzy on purpose! )

Have you ever come across an amazing photo on the internet and then try to use that on your sales literature or printed material?  You paste it into your MS Word flyer and come to find out that it’s too small.  So what you do? You stretch it. 

But here’s the problem:

When you stretch it, it becomes fuzzy.

And even worse:

You print it out or send it to Kinkos (or Staples) and it becomes even more fuzzy.

This is why you can’t use photos from the internet. At least not what we call “web resolution” photos.  Web resolution photos are small-sized photos that are enhanced for fast viewing on the internet.  In the design world, they are known as “72dpi” or 72 dots per inch quality. 

Print resolution (i.e. for press printers) typically use photos with at least 300 dpi, or 300 dots per inch for best quality. 

Unless you have a photo editor program like Photoshop or similar, you probably won’t be able to distinguish this difference.  A fast way to estimate it would be to check the file size.  If it’s under 10KB, most likely the image will be horrible for print.  Like the photo I have above.  Do you notice the difference between this one and the sunset in the previous post?

A general rule of thumb is that most (if not all) photos on the internet cannot be used for printed material.  That’s why www.sxc.hu that I recommended earlier is a great website because these photos are to be used in printed material.

Do you wonder where I get these beautiful photos from?  They are actually free on the internet and they come in handy when designing your website, flyer or postcard so I thought you might find this site useful:

www.sxc.hu

In sha Allah I plan to write some more soon so please check back.  In the meantime, I added some great links for businesses on my blogroll to the left.  I think you’ll like them so go ahead and check them out.

We’ll that would be easy to answer if there was such a thing as typical.  But there’s not.  Maybe in the fast-food industry.  Or the music industry.  But not in the web design industry. 

So, the e-mails from random people go like this,

“I would like to have a website done. How much do you charge?”

It’s kinda like walking into Rogers and saying,

“I would like to have a cell phone.  How much do you charge?”

Well, we all know how overwhelming it can get looking at all the different plans, trying to figure out which is the best deal for you.

I get a lot of those e-mails, regularly.  The answer to that is, it depends.  Do you want a 5 web page, text-only website or do you want an interactive 51 web page website with specialized login, custom forms and diagrams and a forum installed?  You can go from hundreds to thousands of dollars in that one sentence.

That’s why we don’t post ‘typical’ prices on our website.  Instead, when you inquire, I take you through the process of choosing the best deal for you before I quote you.

So, in the future, if you are looking to get a quote from a web designer, it’s a good idea to map out what you want first.  If you want a shortcut, you can take the free report called, “How to Build a Website that Sells for You” on my website, www.OptimizeItDesigns.com.  And if you want a more enhanced website that sells for you, you can take advantage of the marketing tips and questions throughout the report.