Do you really need to pay for a website?

There are still a great many small businesses, volunteer organisations and charities out there that don’t have a web presence because they think it all sounds quite scary and more to the point, costly.

They don’t know who to turn to to ask for help because they think they will get blinded by science or sucked into getting something bigger than what they need.

Not ALL businesses, charities NEED to have an all singing all dancing website. Perhaps all they want is to have a little corner of the Internet so that, when someone enters a website address or perhaps searches for their organisation name, they will see a page or more of information, and how that business or charity can be found.

For anyone who runs a charity or small business who is scared out of their wits at the thought of setting up a website I have one word to say: Wordpress.

Well actually I have a bit more to say…

• Wordpress is a FREE and you can use it to set up a website or blog for just about anything.
• It comes with an admin area that gives YOU full control of the content. If you can use Word Processing software you can use wordpress!
• Hosting is FREE – you won’t get any monthly charges to keep it live.
• You can even set up a free email address to set it up and also to respond to any contact requests (gmail, yahoo, etc)
• You can choose from a great many FREE templates to make it look pretty, some of these templates even let you upload your own header image.
• A Wordpress BLOG can be made to look like a WEBSITE. You don’t have to worry about ‘posts’ you can just include a few pages (home, about us, contact us)
• You can upgrade a wordpress blog to have a ‘proper’ domain (for a small fee) and you could pay for hosting too which allows you to do more with it and have fancy plug ins. But do you need all that? Not everyone does.

Starting off with something like Wordpress is a great way to help ease you into the world of websites. Later on when you are more confident you just might want to put a bit more into it. But why shell out loads of dosh and get premature grey hairs if you don’t need to (yet)? I could go on and on about this but perhaps it’s time you saw for yourself:

Go to Wordpress.com, fill out the form and you are off. Play around with themes, play around with pages and posts, play around with content and adding images. Make it fun, don’t stress.

Wordpress sign up page - simple eh?

(Tip: You could always create a test account first. When you are confident you can simply create a ‘proper’ one for your little business or charity)

If this still sounds too scary…

Time willing, I may be able to start you off. No charge. No strings. All I ask is that you can answer yes to each of these:

1. You are a charity or not for profit organisation
2. You are based in and operate within Tameside
3. You don’t have a website

Now, simply get in touch (make sure you tell me your name, contact number, email address, organisation name) and I will get back to you.