Should You Manage Your Own Small Business Website?

With WordPress—an extremely user friendly Content Management System—becoming a popular go-to for web development, small business owners can now save on the cost of a webmaster by taking control and managing your own website.

It’s easier than you think!

The WordPress admin dashboard is very intuitive. If you can use Facebook, you can figure out the back end of your website.

However, it’s not something you should guess at. Prior to development, ask your web designer to include a few hours of training in the invoice. This way you’ll know exactly where to go to make the changes you want.

Remember that WordPress is more than just a blog. To add new articles, you would simply add “New Post”. To update the information on an existing page, logged in users can “Edit This Page” right from the dashboard.

After that, developers use various plugins and tools to expand on your website. Adding events, images, sliders, widgets, and other data is just as easy as long as you know where to go and how to do it properly.

The beauty of WordPress is that you can manage your own small business website without knowing code. However…

It’s not as easy as you think either.

Without the training and experience of a webmaster, you’re only going to see your website from the site owner’s perspective. You’ll be capable of updating things viewed on the back end, but don’t let go of your webmaster just yet!

For security reasons, the WordPress software needs to be updated… frequently. It’s not a good idea to go through the one-click update of any software without first identifying and addressing incompatibility with all software being used on your website, including tools and plugins.

An easy compromise.

If you feel capable of managing the front end of your website, with proper training, consider paying your webmaster to provide the appropriate training and retaining his or her services for an annual contract of at least one hour a month.

This way, you will not have to wait for your webmaster to get around to adding those new pictures because you can do them yourself. At the same time, you won’t have to worry about paying extra for “emergency repair” because “I attempted to update a plugin and something went wrong, now my images don’t display at all!”

In other words, don’t let go of your webmaster and always appreciate the services they provide! On the other hand, if you don’t feel that you’re getting your money’s worth… you might want to consider replacing your current webmaster with somebody more reliable and trustworthy.