Why I love WordPress for websites

I have spent the past several weeks really diving deep into designing and redesigning websites. I also spent a lot of time reading and researching.

Some history

When I initially started to plan out my Beeghley Tech Innovation website, it looked at a ton of different designs. Then I placed what I wanted in a website on a sheet of paper and drew some sketches. From there, I determined that my best option was a website that included a blog feature. But how do I do this? Enter WordPress!

Creating a website with WordPress

I had used WordPress on my Teaching the Civil War with Technology blog but never as a full website. First, I needed a theme. A theme will give you the overall look for your website and be the means for customizing your website. I looked at free themes but I wanted something that would be supported and updated as WordPress updated. So, I decided on the Thesis theme.

Once everything was installed and running, I started by roughing out the pages I wanted and customizing the layout. I quickly learned that I can easily customize colors, fonts, how the columns are setup and even how the pages are displayed.WordPress allowed me to set a static welcome page and place this blog on a separate page.

Within about 30 minutes, I had setup and installed a pretty good looking website. All that was left was to refine the content.

Not too shabby.

A long over due website redesign

My Teaching the Civil War with Technology website was long over due for a makeover. I really needed to combine info from several different sites into a single location. Having information on multiple sites really hurt me in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So, I basically followed the same process I did for this site and in a few hours (it took a while to migrate the blog) I had moved information from three sites to one, cleaned up ugly looking links and URLs and improved my SEO. What does improved SEO mean? My teaching the Teaching the Civil War with Technology website went from page 3 in Google to #2 on page 1 of Google in two weeks!