How to Have A Website and Keep All of Your Hair

I’ve worked with websites a lot over the years, so it is amazing I still have a full head of hair. Back when I was doing marketing for a college, I was faced with a decision I’m sure many authors and artists face every day; pay someone big bucks to build and maintain our website, or save money by doing it myself. I chose to save the money (unless you believe that time is money, in which case I didn’t save much). I hunkered down to learn the web. More often than not, I felt tangled in it more than I felt like a “web master”. Thankfully, times and tools have changed, and if I had to make that same decision again today, I’d choose the do-it-myself road, knowing it has become much easier to walk. The reason? Something called a Content Management System, or CMS. In fact, even more specifically than that, something called WordPress.

Enter WordPress

It used to be that websites needed to be designed and maintained locally, on your computer, and then uploaded to a web server (basically just a computer hooked up to the internet that is left on all of the time so people can find your website). You had to have software to do this, and that software fell into two categories; cheap and awful, or pricey and decent. Notice there was no ‘awesome’ category. Buying and learning a whole piece of software, just to change your contact number, seemed like overkill even then, but there were no viable alternatives. The CMS changed all of that.

A Content Management System allows you to, well, manage content. It doesn’t build your website for you, but rather allows you to manage and update the content on your website. Tricky things like making your logo just the right size on all of your pages may still require a web designer, but everyday things, like changing the text in a paragraph, adding an image you just painted or an upcoming workshop you are offering, are made easy. While early CMS systems were clunky and confusing, WordPress came along as a way to make blogging as simple and elegant as possible. It caught on quick, then evolved into a full CMS, allowing you to create and edit an entire website. WordPress, with their classic “code is poetry” tagline, became the first CMS I could confidently use and recommend to others. It was the first CMS I actually believed everyone could learn and love. I still believe that.

Where Did My Software Go?

WordPress is still software, but it has moved onto the internet. It lives “in the cloud”, which is a fancy way to say, on the internet rather than on a local machine. Better still, it is open source, which is a fancy way to say, free (among other things). WordPress allows you to edit your website from ANY computer ANY where, so long as you have a modern web browser and the internet. Those of you who tend to bring your work home, be warned, because now you can.

About That Hair

A CMS won’t do everything for you. WordPress handles the ‘moving parts’ of your website (the technical, code part), but you still need to find a way to make it look real pretty. Thankfully there are thousands upon thousands of themes (WordPress word for templates) available, from free to premium. You may still need to hire someone to help install WordPress, set up your web hosting and domain name, and make some initial customizations to your chosen theme. But after that, the sky clears considerably. Heck, even the default theme looks really, really nice and allows you to upload a custom banner image to make it your own.

With WordPress, you no longer need to call that expensive web guy or gal to update your blog, change your cell phone number or add some photos of your latest exhibition. These are all things you can (honestly) do yourself, whenever you please. There is a ton of training out there, and we at PageMaster are offering our own WordPress Workshops in the new year.

Getting Started: PageMaster Sites

This post comes on the heels of our big announcement last week. PageMaster Sites are a WordPress based system tailored to the authors and artists we work with here at PageMaster. PageMaster Sites run powerful plugins and beautiful themes that take them beyond the basic install of WordPress. We handle the setup and technical maintenance details of your site, and train you to use it. With the approproate Site Plan we will even do all of the editing for you, but we’d love to empower you to take control of your own web presence, because we believe you can. That’s what makes this different from the old way of doing the web. You still pay for setting your site up, and basic monthly costs to keep it running smoothly, but you don’t need to pay for every little (or even big) content edit any more. The key word here? Empowering.

That being said, you can install WordPress yourself, and there are many resources online for learning to use this wonderful, freely available tool. WordPress.com actually lets you set up a wordpress blog for free (which you can tweak to behave like a full website), on their servers. It’s a really great deal, but it does have some drawbacks when compared to having your own WordPress site.  For instance, their basic setup doesn’t include your own domain name, and you cannot install plugins, which make WordPress really, really powerful and adaptable to your needs. In contrast, our artist and author sites include a plugin for managing an online calendar of upcoming events. Our artist sites include NextGen Gallery, a powerful gallery plugin to display your work. Both include plugins for social media integration. Our themes are pretty awesome, too, and they are only available with PageMaster Sites.

Start Your Site and Keep the Hair

We’d imagine you like your hair, so we hope you find WordPress a less stressful way to maintain an effective online presence, regardless of whether or not PageMaster Sites are the solution you choose.

If you have any more questions about PageMaster sites, contact us today. We’d love to hear from you and help you keep your website, and your hair, looking great.

Find our PageMaster sites pages here.