WordPress blogs have many advantages for consultants and small business owners. Here are just a few of the benefits:

1. Easy to install. Many web hosts offer one-click installs of the WordPress software. You can log in and install it yourself in a matter of moments. My favorite host for this is Dreamhost.com.
2. Easy to maintain. Adding pages and posts to your site will be a breeze. There’s no excuse for static content on your site with WordPress.
3. Tons of built-in options. You can add all sorts of functionality to your site with widgets and plug-ins. Linking your Twitter feed? Of course. Adding a Search Engine Optimization engine? That – and much more – can be yours with just a few clicks.
4. Templates, templates, templates. I’m not normally a fan of design templates, since it can put your business in danger of not standing out. But a WordPress template is slightly different – you can easily modify the headers on many of them to custom-brand them. Then, you don’t have to have the whole blog custom-coded – saving you time and money.
5. Customization. A designer can go in “behind the scenes” and plug in new graphics, change the color of buttons to match your brand, and really make your blog look different. The image on this page is of two WIC members’ blogs (Joanne Sperans of Volo Coaching and Susan Monroe of Written Right) that were built off of the same template – you can see how different they look!
   
6. Make it look like a blog or a regular website. You can hide your blog posts section, eliminate the sidebar widgets and just use the Pages function of WordPress to build a website in disguise. Then, you get all of the benefits listed above without the blogging commitment.

By: Erin Ferree

For those of you managing a WordPress blog but aren’t backing up your site, Christopher Penn posted a nice article on how to back up your WordPress blog in 60 seconds. When reading the article, make sure to read the couple of comments at the end that refer to also backing up database files (pasted below, too) 

“Yeah… I use a plug-in that automatically backs up the whole database and emails it to me. Daily. I save a month’s worth of backups so if something goes ugly or gets hacked, I can walk it back to when it WORKED.”

“Please be aware, though, that the WP export function only backs up internal-to-WordPress portions of your database. If you use plug-ins that store information in DB fields (such as PodPress), this will not keep that data safe. For that, I suggest you use WP-DB-Backup.”

Read the full “How to Back Up Your WordPress Blog in 60 Seconds” article

By: Avery Horzewski