This is the story of how a musician found his way into WordPress – I’m no pro but WordPress has changed my life and I hope my story encourages many more to explore how awesome this application really is!
There are many CMS’s and Blogging tools/sites out there to use for your web site.
Joomla is a very popular CMS, however I found it to be very complicated and used it for a couple years on and off. Then one day I installed a Joomla update which destroyed my site in about 10 seconds, and I swore I would never go back.
Thank goodness that site crashed, because I never would have come across WordPress if I had not been forced to look for another tool.
My Quest.
In my quest to find a better tool I did research on many and had a year experience with Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Web Tool which is primarily for Windows web sites on a Windows partition and not a Linux partition.
What would take me a week to do in MS Expression I found out later I could do in a few minutes in WordPress.
I came across a great how toWordPress video tutorial on YouTube and I have never looked back since. WordPress, at the risk of sounding like a cult member, has changed my life for the better.
I’m a professional guitarist and not a professional programmer, yet in one afternoon and a pot of very strong coffee, I managed to put up my first WordPress web site without any personal help other than a YouTube video tutorial.
I went live on the web in the same day and had a working, useful site for my business.
Guess what it cost?
WordPress – zero dollarsand zero cents
Domain name – 10 bucks
Web hosting from GoDaddy.com – 5 bucks a month
A professional web developer would have charged me anywhere from $500 dollars to $5000 dollars for a site that I now have the control and satisfaction of doing myself.
What I Did Next:
Well I purchased more domain names, and over a course of 3 months put up a total of 19 web sites.
I found out that not only can I install WordPress on a primary domain but also on a sub-domain or even a folder if I wanted.
Through research I realized if I had a choice between installing on a sub-domain or a folder I would choose sub-domain because according to reports about how Google handles sub-domain’s I would get more traffic using the sub-domain approach. These reports I may add, are not confirmed but rather word of mouth.
So why bother with a sub-domain?
You can buy a primary domain name and create multiple sub-domains off that one primary domain. It’s a sure way to same some money, instead buying so many domain names (the sub-domain doesn’t cost money). The URL will look a little different however.
Let’s say your primary domain is http://www.mydomain.com and you create a sub-domain called “mysub” you would access the sub-domain web site by using this URL: http://mysub.mydomain.com, –so you connect the two by a period.
So the next question is, why would anyone with a sane mind want 19 web sites?
My thought at the time was,
Gee if one site to advertise my business works, then why not 19, therefore getting 19 times more traffic, – the more the merrier, right?
This is logical, except I made one fatal mistake – I used duplicate content on all 19 sites, and guess what, Google doesn’t like duplicate content and ignores your site and lowers your web ranking therefore defeating the whole purpose.
I might add that even though I had duplicate content, every one of those sites used a different theme, which I found out after the fact, makes no difference whatsoever to Google. So the motto here is “live and learn!”.
Finally!
So now I am down to a small five web sites instead of 19. Each site offers different content and some are Blog sites and some are just plain web site’s.
In my next article I will go in-depth on using WordPress as a Blog and or as a regular web site.
In conclusion I would never use anything but WordPress after my positive experience with it and after building 19 web sites. Sorry Microsoft but your tools don’t compare!
I’m still learning this thing called WordPress and having an incredible amount of fun!
How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?
A good way to start is to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We keep you up to date by bringing you the freshest WordPress content from the brightest minds in the industry.
No Comments