I’m so happy my website has finally been converted and everything is now on its designated pages.  I have to admit, I had a lot of fun converting my website to a weblog and I can’t tell you how happy I am about the maintenance aspect. Talk about making a persons life easier! Content management systems such as the one I’m using (Wordpress) are a beautiful thing.

Now you’re probably thinking ‘Wait, what?  This isn’t a website its a blog!‘.  Yes it is, I prefer to call it a weblog, but it functions exactly like a website, there is no real difference – lets take a look, you have:

• A Home Page – which is your latest post area OR you can change it to a static page like a normal website, the choice is yours.
• Pages – you have the typical page structure – About/Products-Services/Contact Us
• Top/Side Navigation – navigation still remains the same, with the parent/child pages going on
• Addons – Cool features that your designer usually added you can now take advantage of and install them yourself.
• Photo Gallery – they have a singular image or gallery option to choose from to display your images. . .

You have all the functionality of a normal website and the best thing about it is. . .YOU are the one that is sitting at the driver’s seat of your website.  You are the one that is maintaining your own content without the need of that “specialised” go-to person.  It kicks the hum-drum of website maintenance like “updates“ to the curb and cuts out those long and tedious email/phone dances that I’m sure many businesses have experienced with their design company, just to get their A’s into gear and upload those changes you needed like. . .2 days ago.

Weblogs as a website is a fun and easy alternative for small businesses to take advantage of and take back some control and direct your website content how you want, of cause there will be one or two things that you will need your designer for but it won’t be very often.  If you wished your website was more interactive well having a Wordpress weblog gives you that interaction through the comment section below each post and page.  Customers are able to ask questions, share stories, links or just say thanks.  And it’s these little things that they will probably appreciate and enjoy.

There are so many cool features and plugins available to you when you use a content management system such as Wordpress – such as:

• Social Media widgets
• e-commerce plugins
• Contact forms
• stats

and so much more!  There is always something new being created and there is guaranteed to be something available that you really need.  So it’s something to think about – websites needn’t be boring or cumbersome to have, not when you have the option of running it yourself.  So next time your in the market for a website. . .think about going the weblog way.  You may find yourself wondering why you hadn’t done so in the first place.