If you build it, they will come!

(Social Media Basics, Part Two)

Every work of timeless art begins with a blank canvas.

In the case of successful Internet initiatives, and the websites that fuel them, that blank canvas is the programming infrastructure upon which they are built.

Much has changed since the pioneering days when programmers went blind writing lines of code to give birth to a website.  For years, companies like Microsoft and Macromedia made enormous strides toward making the process easier and more reliable with ingenious website authoring software.  But then a sea-change occurred called “open source”.  Suddenly, countless programmers around the world began writing new software which they made available to others at no cost.  The ultimate end result was a software tool called WordPress.

Beginning as a simple approach to blogging, WordPress has become a mainstay in the search for the perfect website building software.  It is free, hugely functional, constantly improving, innovative, manageable by non-programmers, and most importantly, highly conducive to the phenomenon we call Social Media.  It has come from obscurity to become one of the preeminent website building software tools available today.

In the enchanting movie, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner is told by a ghost to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield.  “If you build it,” he is told, “they will come.”  In much the same way, visitors will come to your website in larger numbers if it has been built in a fully Social Media-enabled implementation of WordPress.

More to the point in terms of effectiveness, web design companies who had previously been an aggregation of worker-bee computer programmers, were suddenly given the time and inclination to provide their clients with something infinitely more valuable, business acumen and online expertise.  Fees that were being paid to web designers, gradually were redirected to entrepreneurs, whose contribution was bottom-line profit enhancement instead of eye-candy.

Since its inception, WordPress has been widely accepted, but not without occasional criticism.   It has been said that WordPress was grand for blogs but was less than sophisticated enough for general purpose websites.  To this criticism I would counter that the Jericho Technology website you are visiting today was built, and is managed day-to-day, exclusively with WordPress and the many useful add-ons that are available.   Countless hours have been saved in the way we approach our business, and our time has been freed to help our clients with the bigger issues of how to sell their products and services, how to encourage their brand identity, how to better serve their customers, and how to enhance their profits.

Beginning tomorrow, we will begin to explore the many dramatic tools that empower websites to take full advantage of Social Media.

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