#1: Having a website gives potential clients or customers round-the-clock access to your practice or business.  Your customers can read about you and your offerings when it’s convenient to them, rather than having to wait for your business hours to make contact.

#2: A website adds credibility to your practice or business. According to a 2010 Pew research study, 79% of adults use the internet … clients expect to find you online, and will wonder why your competitors have a web presence and you don’t.

#3: Print yellow pages and newspaper ads don’t work well anymore. Newspaper circulation in developed countries has been falling for decades … people go online to find their news. And a 2010 study showed that 53.85% of those surveyed never use the yellow pages, but 100% of them used Google to find products and services. And that means money spent on traditional advertising could be better spent elsewhere.

#4: Websites can help you reach new markets and geographical areas. Your site gives you a round-the-clock presence that can be accessed by anyone with internet access, anywhere in the world. And it helps with word-of-mouth referrals … even if someone can’t recall your phone number or address, they’re likely to remember your name … and your name can be googled.

#5: Online catalogs and brochures don’t need to be reprinted if they’re out of date. This is a matter of both convenience and cost; it’s a lot easier and cheaper to log onto your website and add or change a product or an address than to reprint a glossy brochure or catalog.

#6: You can open an online store or provide your clients with an online payment option. This is a convenience to potential clients/customers that adds to the attractiveness of your site as a place to do business.

#7: Keep clients aware of special events, offers, and business changes. This can be accomplished via special announcements on your site, blog posts, and/or special mailings. A popular marketing approach is the opt-in mailing list, which you can use to keep current and potential clients informed, either via broadcast announcements or an email newsletter.

#8: Provide existing clients with a place where they can get support. This may include a contact page for support, an FAQs page, articles and white papers, tutorials, or a community forum.

#9: It’s easier and cheaper to give your website address than to mail a brochure. Your website address can be added to your letterhead, added to your email signature, or placed on your business card. Or, it can be scrawled on a scrap of paper after you’ve given your elevator speech. Print brochures, on the other hand, are expensive to develop and print, expensive to distribute, and a hassle to maintain.

#10: A strong website presence is cost effective advertising and gives you a competitive advantage. Running a series of print ads and placing ads in the yellow pages can quickly run into thousands of dollars … and you’ll need to repeat the expenditure next year. As noted in #3 above, this may not be a great way for the small business to spend its limited advertising dollars these days. Here’s an interesting article on using your website as a marketing tool for your business or practice.

Note: these solutions are WordPress only – they don’t work on sites developed with other software. These have all worked for me, but I’m not guaranteeing you’ll find them as useful … this post represents my personal opinion, and at present I have no affiliate relationships at the time of this post’s publication with any of these plugins.

Essential Plugins

This is my basic toolkit … all sites I create, whether for my personal use or my clients, will have most of these installed since they provide the basic performance, findability, analysis, and security needs for a WordPress site.

QuickCache – I don’t use this on every site, but where I do, boy can it make a difference. Simple, easy to use caching plugin that improves performance on many sites. I’ve found it much easier to use than some of the others out there, but if you use WPTouch for mobile access, be aware that you have to fiddle with them to get them to play nice together. Free.

WPTouch Pro - Again, I use this for sites where the client wants a site that’s customized for smart phones and pads. Elegant and simple solution that works especially great on the iPad. $39 for a single site license — there’s a free version but it doesn’t provide iPad support.

BackupBuddy – Really elegant and fast solution for backing up sites, and migrating them (I use it to migrate client sites from my test server to their live servers). You can backup to cloud storage (like Amazon S3, Dropbox, or RackSpace) with this tool. Includes backup scheduling. $75 for a two-site license — yeah, it’s pricey, but worth it if like me you work with a lot of sites. If you’re looking free, I’ve used and recommend XCloner — it’s one of the best solutions for someone who just has one site to backup.

Better WP Security - All-in-one security management for your site. If you’re going to use it, be aware that some of the option can interfere with the proper functioning of other plugins, and can mess up your site’s functioning — so be careful. Note that you can do a lot of this manually, or with other plugins — I prefer it because it lets me do it all in one place. Free.

Akismet – Simple low maintenance spam elimination; free for non-commercial sites, license fee for commercial sites (a single site is $5 per month). The approach I’m currently taking with commercial sites (including the current one) is: Growmap Anti-Spambot plus Topsy Blocker plus add Discussion blacklisted terms in WordPress. This combination is a free solution. Another solution that may work for you is Defensio, which is currently free for personal sites and small businesses (up to five employees). However, I’ve found Defensio conflicts with Gravity Forms (see Nice-To-Have Plugins, below), and that’s why I’m not using it on this site. If you’re not using Gravity Forms, however, Defensio may be a great solution for you.

All-In-One SEO Pack – A good SEO solution that I prefer to the others I’ve tried. Note that it may mess up Permalinks, and the fix is to simply go to the Permalinks setting and save it again (you’ll know you have this problem if you start getting 404 errors when going to your pages following activation). Free.

Ultimate Google Analytics plus Google Analytics Dashboard – The first activates Google Analytics (GA) on your pages, the second displays GA statistics right in your dashboard. Free.

Google XML Sitemaps - Creates an XML sitemap file and pings the major search engine when there’s a change to your site. Free.

Nice-To-Have Plugins

These are some of the more powerful plugins I find myself going back to over and over again. You may find them useful for your personal sites, and if you’re a WordPress developer, you really should consider adding these to your toolkit.

Link Library – Great way to organize a whole lot of links by category. Free.

Pods CMS - Create custom content types; I’ve used it to implement book reviews on a site. Requires some PHP skills to be able to use effectively, but very powerful. This is the one that turns WordPress into a true CMS, in my opinion. Major new version soon to be released. Free.

Comprehensive Google Map Plugin – Great way to embed Google Maps in your site. Free.

NextGEN Gallery - One of the best photo gallery plugins out there. Also take a look at NextGEN Scroll Gallery (an add-on for NextGEN). Free.

Ultimate Category Excluder – I like to use this on sites where there are Category pages as well as a main blog on the front page; Excluder lets you exclude those Categories from the front page. Free.

Content Scheduler – Use for scheduling publication and expiration of post content. Great for things like time-sensitive information and announcements. You can also set it up to notify people on expiration. Free.

Smart Sliding Notes Pro – Awesome skinnable plugin to do inline notes, accordions, and tabs. Well worth the $22 for the paid version.

Tippy and Glossy – Create fancy tooltips (popups) that can include things like HTML and images. Glossy is an add-on for Tippy that lets you create tips that can be used throughout your site. Free.

All-in-One Event Calendar - Powerful event management calendar; in my opinion, the best in its class. Free.

Events Manager is a powerful system for event registration … it’s much more than a simple calendar. Free (but there’s a Pro version for $75 that integrates PayPal payments and supports custom booking forms).

Ninja Announcements Pro - Great addition for sites that do a lot of announcements. $30, but there’s a free Lite version, too.

WP Google Fonts - There are a lot of font replacement plugins out there, but I like this one for its simplicity. The only downside is, it doesn’t show the fonts in the interface so you have to go to the Google Fonts site, find fonts you like, then verify that they’re supported by the plugin. The site title is generated using this plugin. Free.

Amazon Product In A Post – Really easy way to embed links to Amazon products on your site. Free.

Sociable, ShareThis, TF Social Share, Social Sharing Toolkit, Slick Social Share Buttons - Out of the many social networking plugins out there, these are the ones I like the best. Main difference between them is the presentation; I typically use the one that seems to work best with the theme I’m using and the site I’m creating. All are free.

WP Symposium – Turns a site into a social network. An easier-to-use and less complex alternative to BuddyPress. You might also want to look at Mingle as an alternative (it’s supposed to be even simpler to use than Symposium), though I haven’t tried it myself. Note that BuddyPress has its own themes, and it can be a real hassle to get it to work with other themes (which is one of the reasons I  chose to go with Symposium). All are free.

Wishlist Member – Create membership-driven sites, with dripped content and paid membership programs. Pricey, but pays for itself if you need it. $97.

WP Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – Really simple and easy to use option for adding a PayPal shopping cart to your site. Free.

Officers Directory - Useful for organizations who want to create directories of their officers; provides a contact form that can be used to send email to various officers in an organization. A one-trick pony, but a great convenience if you need it. Free.

Gravity Forms -  Create complex, paged forms for your site. Optional add-ons for various mailing list programs and payment options are available. $39 for a single site. For a free option, have a look at Custom Contact Forms.

Scribe SEO – Adds content authoring help to help you ensure your content will give the best SEO results. Nothing here you can’t do in other ways, but the whole package is well worth the membership price. Starter package is $17 per month; you can cancel at any time, so you can do your analysis then cancel your membership when you don’t need to use the tool any more.

The personal issues I have with RW are:

1. I can’t update client or personal sites from my iPad
2. CMS options for RW are limited in flexibility and scope
3. It doesn’t empower clients to maintain their own sites
4. Integrating third-party scripts/DBs is clumsy and inelegant

Some people like working on the maintenance end of things, keeping things running that they or others have created. I don’t. I like teaching and mentoring much more than maintenance, so I can empower my clients to take control of their own sites. RW’s not a particularly good platform for this model because of 2-4 above. From a business perspective, RW is great for someone who wants to take on clients and continue maintaining their sites for them indefinitely. But that’s not where I’m at, and I also don’t want to maintain partially hand-coded PHP solutions for folks like I’ve done in the past.

Enter WordPress … which has become a full-blown CMS that is ideal for the small to medium sized business. I worked with Drupal for some time, and that’s a great CMS solution for the enterprise … but it’s overkill for the kind of sites people have engaged me to do. There was a point at which I had to ask myself: what did RW give me over WordPress with the right plugins and themes? I couldn’t come up with a good answer.

I own two theme frameworks for WordPress: Genesis and Builder. The latter is sort of the WordPress equivalent of Stacks. I also have learned to program custom content types and behaviors with a plugin called Pods CMS, and with Pods, Genesis, and Builder in my toolkit (and with other powerful plugins like BuddyPress and bbPress), I can do more than I could do with RW and deliver a sophisticated and complex solution to my clients.

For the small number of sites that are beyond WordPress’ capabilities, there’s Drupal or Joomla … and those clients I’ll refer out, since I don’t really want to get into providing enterprise solutions of that level of complexity. Though I’d do a SharePoint 2010 or MediaWiki solution for someone if they needed it, since I’ve become adept at working with those platforms in my 9 to 5 job. Same with developing eLearning solutions using Articulate Studio since I’ve been engaged in a heavy investigation of eLearning in my current 9 to 5 job. Again, this isn’t something RW is particularly good at.

So, no negatives toward RW; it’s just not for me given the type of clients I want to work with and the kind of support I want to provide them. It’s more a matter of personality type than anything else: I believe some people are wired to prefer working on the creative end of things, and become quickly bored working in “maintenance mode”; others are wired to prefer the stability and predictability of “maintenance mode”. I’m more of the former than the latter … and for me a CMS like WordPress makes more sense.

Someone asked: would Stacks 2 with its embedded CMS capabilities change things for me?

I’m afraid it doesn’t. The vendor of Stacks (Nimblehost) wrote: “Imagine being able login to your own RW site from anywhere, add and edit content, control when that content is published, upload media, and create new users — all without needing to subscribe to any third party monthly service!” Well, I can do all that and more in WordPress. I’m sure it will be a great product for some, but it doesn’t address my issues 3 and 4 above.
Even if Nimblehost (who I greatly admire) comes up with a great CMS that integrates well with RW I have to ask: what’s the point? There are hundreds of CMS platforms out there, and WordPress is one of the Big Dogs. WordPress is a major platform that powers 22 percent of new active websites in the USA. It’s an open source platform that has thousands of developers supporting it with themes and plugins. I feel more comfortable putting my energy into the WordPress ecosystem, than into a specialized CMS built by a small company to run on a web design platform developed by another small company.

My personal belief is: the day of running software on your Mac or PC to develop websites has come and gone, and Mac/PC based applications like Sandvox and RW will within a decade go the way of the dinosaurs. Applications like DreamWeaver and BBEdit will remain, because there will always be a need for custom development … at least to some degree. But I believe the future belongs to the CMS like WordPress and Drupal, and there’s no real advantage to my continuing to use RW and its plugins and themes, when everything I need (features, plugins, themes) can be found in WordPress. Again, this is a personal opinion I’ve come to after a lot of thought. It’s no reflection on the quality of work fine folks at Nimblehost and Realmac do, but for someone who follows a business model like mine, RW doesn’t make sense any more.

Disclaimer: I’m a Builder and Genesis affiliate, so if you use the links in the sidebar I will receive payment. Here’s my full affiliate disclaimer.

A WordPress site is made up of posts (your standard blog fare), pages (more static presentations of content, like the other pages on this site), and widgets (the blocks you see in the sidebar and the footer area on this page, and sometimes in other locations on your page).

A theme provides styling for your website. This includes images, colors, fonts, and the general structure for your websites and pages. It may also include specialized plugins and widgets when it’s installed, that work with the theme to provide special features.

A framework is a parent theme that controls the structure and behavior of child themes that are associated with it. For example, this site was built with a framework named Builder, which (as its name suggests) lets you put together your site pages using basic building blocks that are filled with various kinds of content. It’s not unusual for a framework to come with multiple special plugins and child themes. The advantage of the parent-child framework is that it separates how the pages are structured and behave (parent) from the styling information (child) making updates much easier.

A plugin is a piece of code that adds features to your site. All the blocks in the left sidebar on this site, for example, were created by installing and setting up plugins.

The relationship between themes and plugins can get very complex. For example, BuddyPress is a plugin that has its own plugins and themes associated with it … BuddyPress provides a powerful tool for creating social networks using WordPress. Sofa Stockphoto is a theme that includes a stock photo store and customer deposit system, much like iStockPhoto’s.

I always carefully review and test plugins and themes for the sites I develop. I look for plugins and themes that are widely used, are compatible with the other components I’m using, and that receive good reviews. For themes, that usually means commercial quality paid themes … free isn’t always better, since free WordPress themes can sometimes hide nasty surprises.

• It’s free unless you want certain advanced features (clients just go to the URL I give them)
• You don’t need any special software or plugins, just a browser
• You can mark up web pages, Microsoft Office documents, images, and PDFs
• It includes a virtual whiteboard and a simple collaborative text editor
• It incorporates chat and voice features for meetings

Here’s what a Twiddla meeting page looks like when I’m collaborating with a client on a website (click image to see larger version):

The document you’re working with is on the left, the collaboration pane (text and voice) is on the right. Here, I’ve added an arrow and a sticky note to the page. WebEx and GoToMeeting are great for the Big Dogs, Twiddla is perfect for the rest of us.

(Note: I’m not a Twiddla affiliate, and am not compensated in any way for this review).

• The introduction of child themes separates the styling and appearance of the parent theme from the functionality in the parent. This makes updating the theme easier, since customizations in the child theme won’t be wiped out when the parent is updated. It also makes possible the development of powerful frameworks that support a large number of child themes.
• Multi-user WordPress allows social networks and user communities to be built around a WordPress installation, using powerful plugins like BuddyPress.
• A proliferation of powerful free and commercial plugins extend WordPress’ functionality so its flexibility is more than adequate for most small and medium-sized business sites.

What WordPress isn’t suitable for developing in my opinion is huge, complex sites with a lot of complex functionality like Amazon or eBay … that’s where a powerhouse CMS like Drupal shines. But few of us are looking to create a site of that scope.

Further, clients want access via their mobile devices like smart phones and iPads, and WordPress provides a number of mechanisms that support mobile access.

I considered the other major CMS platforms … Joomla! and Drupal … in making this move. But for many site requirements, these platforms are overkill in my opinion … and with version 3, WordPress has grown from a simple blogging platform to a full fledged CMS. WordPress now power over 17% of the top million websites worldwide, and 22% of the active domains in the USA are powered by WordPress.