On today's episode, we are going to talk about how to build a business website with WordPress, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 336.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today, we'll be continuing the series on how to build certain types of websites. And today, we'll be focusing on how to build a business website.

But I've got first a few announcements that I wanna share with you. The first one is an article that I found over on WP Tavern, and it says that WordPress 4.8 release is targeted for June.

And remember, last year, with the State of the Word address that Matt gave, that we weren't gonna have scheduled regular releases. We were gonna have every three months or every four months like we have been having over the last couple years. They were gonna have three releases during the course of the year.

And this first one is targeted for June 8. Like I said, the beta is scheduled for May 12. And it's basically going to improve and enhance the Tiny MCE element, the new media widgets, what you see is what you get text widgets, and Word Camp meetup dashboard upgrade to News section. It's all about the editor and just trying to make that experience so much better, so much easier for the end user to use. And so, there's a lot of stuff that will be updated.

And I haven't had a chance to install the beta because, well, it's not May 12 yet. And so, later this week, we'll get it, and then we'll get our first glance, and we'll be able to take a look and see what is happening and what is going on. So, that's the first piece of news today that I wanna share.

Another thing that I wanna share is, over at AffiliateWP.com, and that is obviously an affiliate plugin that works with WordPress, but now, they have the ability to – they've added a feature in Version 1.6 that you can do recurring referrals is now released.

So, if you have some sort of product that you wanna give a referral fee to, you can do that. But now, if you wanna give them a monthly referral fee, I'm thinking like a MailChimp or a convert kit, you know, you can give an affiliate a payout once, or you can give them a payout every month, depending on how long that customer is with the company. So, that is something that's built in. I've got a link in the show notes for that episode or that article.

Another thing that I wanna share with you is, in October, there is going to be a WooConf in Seattle, Washington. So, it's the official WooCommerce developer conference. It's returning for the third year, and it's happening October 19 and 20. And it was held two years ago in San Francisco and last year in Austin. And now, it's being held in Seattle.

And so, WooCommerce downloads have doubled from 12 million to 24 million from 2016 to 2017. And the plugin is active on three million websites and has a strong third-party developer network.

And so, if you are in that sphere and you wanna learn more about WooCommerce – and I went to the event last year, and it was just really amazing. I picked up so many cool things that you can do with WordPress that are just outside the box that I never thought of. Plus, it's just been – it was great to meet people in the community, answer questions, hang out, and it is a top-notch event.

Think about a WordCamp, and it's way above and beyond that. And it does have a higher price tag. The price is on sale through July 1 for $499.00, and that's the early-bird ticket price. And then, after that, the prices will go up $200.00.

And so, there is also a golden ticket competition where they'll offer prospective attendees a chance to win an all-expenses-paid trip to the event in Seattle, including travel accommodations, admission to the conference, and more.

So, I have a link to that in the show notes as well. So, if you're interested in heading out to Seattle this summer, definitely check out – I guess that's in the fall in October, so definitely check that out.

And then, lastly, I stumbled upon a page on the WordPress.org site this week that's WordPress.org/about/stats. And it gives you the ability to look and see the percentages of what people are running when it comes to their WordPress sites.

So, for example, you can see that 53.8 percent of websites are on 4.7, and then 10 percent are on 4.6, 8 percent are on 4.5, and then the list goes down and down and down. It's surprising, but there is 0.3 percent are still on 3.1, and 0.5 percent of people are on 3.0. So, that's really crazy that there's that many people running that old of versions of WordPress.

But you can also see what PHP versions people are running. The most common one is PHP 5.6, which is almost 40 percent, and then 5.5 and then 5.4. And so, we've got a lot of old technology running there in PHP.

MySQL, we've got 38 percent – or I guess 45 percent is running 5.5, and then almost 40 percent is running 5.6. And then some people are running higher, and then some people are running lower.

And then you can see that 50 percent − 50.3 percent have their websites set to English as the native language, and then it goes down from there, but French is at 3.5, German 5.2 − just a really neat page to look and kind of see some of the stats and see where the technology is and who's running what.

So, if you're interested in looking at that, you've got some circle graphs there. You can go ahead and check that out. And, again, that link's in the show notes for Episode No. 336.

Okay. In the, "Is there a plugin for that?" section, there's more than 48,000 plugins in the WordPress repository. The thing is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so, I try to highlight each week just a cool plugin that you may want to use on your website for some particular reason.

And today's plugin is called Any Post widget. And this is a lightweight widget that allows a user to choose any post to display quickly and easily drag and drop ordering right there in a sidebar.

And so, it's pretty simple, and it doesn't have a lot of options basically. It's a widget that you add to your widget area. You add a title, so you can say, like, "Most popular post," or whatever. And then you can go in, and there's just dropdown menus, and then you pick which post that you want to go in one of those dropdown menus.

It's a little cumbersome when you have hundreds and hundreds of posts, but you can add multiple, so you can add four, five, six, seven, eight of them, or just two of them. And then they're all drag-and-droppable. So, you can pick a few, and then you can rearrange them.

And you can definitely do this and run your heatmaps and see how many people are actually looking at – are people clicking on this? Are they not? And that was from an episode a few weeks ago.

I do have heatmaps running on YourWebsiteEngineer.com, and I don't have enough stats that I wanna share with you right this minute, but I'll be sharing some information soon about some of the stats and the details that I'm getting for people that are coming to my website. So, that'll be something to look forward to in the coming weeks and months.

Okay. Today, let's go ahead and dive in, and we're gonna talk about how to create a small-business website with WordPress. And so, last week, we talked about a podcasting website, and so that's a little bit more of a niche target. And the business website, I think, can be – it's a very much broader type of website that you may be building, whether it be for yourself or for clients or just friends or family or somebody that you may need to help set WordPress up.

So, let's go ahead and just dive in and talk about it a little bit, how to build a business website. And I think WordPress is obviously the best solution for any website, but in today's scenario, for example, I wanna share that and kind of talk through the two differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org for small-business websites because I think, either way, you can start with one or the other. You can flipflop back and forth. That's the beauty of using WordPress.

But I think there are some really great things and some advantages of using WordPress.com to host a business website that maybe sometimes are overlooked. And so, let's talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using WordPress.com and then the advantages and disadvantages of using self-hosted. And then we can talk about kind of the steps in the process to go through and set up a small-business website.

So, okay, let's dive in and look at the advantages of using WordPress.com. You can start for virtually free, and I say virtually because if you have a domain name already for your business, all you need to pay is for domain mapping, which is $15.00, $20.00. It's not a whole lot on WordPress.com. So, you can start very, very inexpensively, and there's no annual monthly fee – or annual monthly; that doesn't make sense – there's no monthly fee to pay unless you upgrade, of course.

Now, another thing that's an advantage of WordPress.com is there's no maintenance or updates. It's basically – I think this is a perfect one that you really wanna analyze what type of client that you have. And if it's somebody that doesn't seem technical enough to be able to keep things updated and keep things safe and secure, then WordPress.com may be the perfect route to go when designing a business website.

You also want to remember that WordPress.com can handle any sorts of traffic because it's like a global thing. The hosting platform is very, very robust, and they've got servers – WordPress.com has servers all over the world, and there's really never a problem of a WordPress.com site going down. So, that's something to thing about, as well.

Now, this is good and bad. If you have a site that's just launching, you only have ten people, your website's still gonna load quickly, and it's gonna always be online. But if you have a website that you're moving from Wix or somewhere else that has hundreds of traffic, hundreds of visitors a day, then that's also going to be a benefit, as well, that you never really have to worry about the level of traffic that's coming to your website.

And then another advantage of using WordPress.com is you do get access to Automattic's Happiness Engineers to answer any questions, kind of work your way through how setting up a website, any questions you may have. And that comes in the way of email support and live chat, as well. So, those are some advantages of using WordPress.com to build a business website.

Some disadvantages, though, is you can't have any custom themes. And so, if you have a really specific idea in mind of how you wanna build your website, most likely you can't do that unless you can do most of it with Custom CSS. You also don't get any additional third-party plugins. You can't install a third-party plugin to enhance the functionality of your website. So, that's another disadvantage of using WordPress.com.

And another disadvantage of using WordPress.com, if you stay on that kind of freer end of the spectrum, some of the design features are going to be locked out unless a subscription is purchased. So, there are two different plans. There's a premium, and then there's a business plan. And business plan pretty much unlocks everything, and then the premium plan – I believe the premium plan's about $100.00 per year; the business plan's about $300.00 per year.

But if you think about $300.00 divided by 12, you're not talking – it's barely $30.00 a month. It's not a whole lot for a website when it comes to your business. If you're running a business, and your only expense – your online expense is $30.00 per month, and you're making thousands of dollars per month, it's pretty much a no-brainer to use WordPress.com.

So, again, I'm a little bit biased towards WordPress.com because I think it's a great platform to get started with. Working for Automattic, you know, we want more people using WordPress.com. And I think if it's a simple enough site, it can be used very, very well, and it can work for a lot of small-business websites, as long as there doesn't need to be a lot of extra custom functionality for the website. If it's just a simple brochure and something that's pretty simple to set up, then WordPress.com may be the right route for you.

Okay. But maybe WordPress.com isn't the right route, and you wanna go via self-hosted. Now, there are some advantages because you can do custom themes; you can do custom code; you can do custom plugins. You get to control the entire thing. You get to make it exactly what you want it to do. You can have custom functionality build in. You can have all these different pieces of the puzzle.

And so, self-hosted WordPress is very much more robust, and we all know this if you've been around the WordPress ecosphere for any given amount of time. And so, there are lots of advantages of using WordPress.com – or self-hosted WordPress for sure.

But there are some disadvantages. And like I said earlier, you have to maintain your site. So, if you're gonna give this over to a client and they have to be able to update plugins and update themes and make sure that things don't break; hosting can go down; you're more likely to get hacked; your database could be hacked or your site could go down, and there's just – there's a lot more moving pieces.

And I say this, so it's not as easy for a client or a business owner – a business owner doesn't care that they have to do all this. They don't wanna add extra things to their plate. They're off, busy running a business. But sometimes this could be an opportunity for you as a developer or you as a website designer or a freelance agent or whatever to offer some sort of service to keep things updated and maintained and keep things running very, very smoothly for them.

So, you've got some advantages and disadvantages for using either self-hosted or WordPress.com. So, I really think that when you're trying to do this for a friend or family or whatever, you get started, okay, first, let's go ahead and look down the routes. What essentially are we gonna do? What are we building here? And is it simple enough? Can we use just WordPress.com?

I think, a lot of times, just WordPress.com gets overlooked by people like me because I don't really – I always like the self-hosted version. I've always used self-hosted. And then, all of a sudden, I started deciding, like, a personal blog for my wife and I, that was on self-hosted. And we'd update it when we travel, update it with life events and things like that, but we'd always – that would be the only time that we'd do anything.

And I'd forget about it, and then I would go in and log in, and I would be one of those people running WordPress 4.2 because I haven't touched the site in a few years because we haven't traveled or we haven't had any life updates or anything.

And so, I ended up, I moved that over to WordPress.com because it's just a simple site. It's basically just a blog, and it just tells our friends and family about what's up and what's been happening in our lives.

And so, I didn't even think WordPress.com was a solution till I really sat down and analyzed, like, hey, I could spend less time keeping this site updated. I could completely forget about it. It's online; it's always there. And then, when I'm ready to use it, it's just there, and I don't have to go and update all the plugins and back everything up and all that good jazz.

So, just I really wanna emphasize in this podcast to think about WordPress.com as a potential solution. And even though you may have to invest a little bit, you may have to upgrade and buy one of the packages, if you don't need really a custom theme and a lot of custom functionality, then WordPress.com is perfect for a business website.

So, once we've chosen that right option, whether self-hosted or WordPress.com, then you need to do the following. And here's kind of some steps to set up a business website, and then we'll be done.

Okay. The first one is, once we've got WordPress up and running, either version, of course, then you wanna choose a theme, you wanna choose a theme that works well and kind of overall shares the point of the website. You don't wanna have a website that's built for a church, and you're using that for a meat market or something crazy like that. You wanna kind of have something that kind of is a theme around whatever the business is.

And then, once we've done that, then we can add navigation and menu items. You can even start adding appropriate pages. And now, with the new version of WordPress, you can actually create menu items that will create the page that you need, which is really nice.

We wanna make sure probably one of the first pages that is on the website − you wanna make sure that this is always there − is a privacy and terms page. Just let people know the privacy and terms. A lot of people won't actually look at this page, but it's a good page to have in reference in case something goes down later on. We definitely wanna have that. And if you need copy for that, you can just kind of Google that online, and you can find different examples and things that you put on a privacy and terms page.

You also wanna add a contact form. Most likely, you'll need a plugin if you're on the self-hosted version. There's a plugin, or you can use the built-in application within WordPress.com to do this.

You'll need to install Google Analytics, unless you just wanna rely on Jetpack Stats, but you wanna know some sort of stats-related information. And if you want Google Analytics on WordPress.com, you'll need to upgrade to that business plan. It's one of those features that are only offered with the business plan.

Then, with the self-hosted version, you'll want to install any other WordPress plugins that you may need, depending on what the site is. Maybe it's a business website, but you're adding a podcasting section to it. Then you might wanna add some podcasting plugins and things that we talked about last week, so that's the next thing.

Then you also wanna customize those widgets, get those headers or the header area, the footer area, the sidebar, wherever those widgets are built into your theme. You wanna set those up and kind of organize them and get that content there. Maybe you wanna put that Any Post plugin that we talked about a little bit ago, and you wanna put that in there so that popular posts can be shared on that website. And so, that's the next step is to customize the widgets.

Then, if you are running self-hosted, you've got a few other things you wanna do. You wanna make sure that you're blocking spam, and so that's what the Akismet plugin or maybe one of the new Jetpack plans that includes Akismet and VaultPress, which VaultPress is one that's automated backup, so we wanna do that if we're on the self-hosted site. You don't need to do that when it's WordPress.com. There's backups included, and that's just all built into WordPress.com.

Once you've kind of got that general scheme set up, then it's time to start creating content for your pages, your posts, adding some media, getting some content out there, so that your website doesn't look bare and blank when it's ready to launch. So, those are some things to do, create content and post some pages.

Then another WordPress or self-hosted thing is to add WordPress security. I guess we could have done that back when we were setting up the backup and the blocking spam. We wanna make sure maybe Better WP, or it's iTheme Security − Better WP is what it used to be called – is probably a perfect one. There's one called Wordfence. There are a couple different extensions out there that can set up and make your website harder to hack into, so that's something you'll wanna do.

Then you'll wanna turn on social icons or sharing buttons, make sure it's easy for people to share with you, share their content on their social channels, whether that be just buttons to share certain each post or page, or the buttons to connect and start following you on Twitter and Facebook, those types of things.

And then you'll want to do some sort of WordPress SEO. That's built into WordPress.com, or you'll need one of the SEO plugins in the WordPress repository to do that, to get that set up, to make sure that Google knows exactly what your site is and how it can best serve the content to people that are doing some sort of Google search.

And then, lastly, is you'll wanna start some sort of email list if you're interested in any way, shape, or form, being able to market directly into the inboxes of the people visiting your site. You'll have to set up something fairly simple or basic inside of your own website. Maybe MailChimp is the best example to do this to get an email list started and just start collecting email addresses.

And so, those are the steps that it takes to build a WordPress business website. So, first, you have to decide WordPress.com or self-hosted, and then kind of go through these steps of setting up the theme and getting things ready and then making sure there's a backup and spam protection and security and all that good jazz. And it seems like a lot of steps, but it's pretty much the typical thing that we do, for the most part, when we set up any type of website. So, that's what I wanna highlight this week.

Next week, we're gonna talk about another type of a website to set up, and we'll continue this journey the rest of the month of May. And until then, we'll talk again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.