An interesting trend has developed of late and one that is long overdue, if the results are anything to go by.

More and more organisations are choosing to strip their web sites down to a more minimalist look and feel and they are choosing to build their newly streamlined web sites using WordPress.

Hang on a minute, isn’t WordPress just for blogging I hear you ask?

And you are half right – WordPress started its life as a blogging platform and many of the worlds most widely read blogs are published using WordPress via www.wordpress.com or via the WordPress plug in loaded in to an existing web server platform.

But thanks to the increasing number of templates or themes being built on top of WordPress it is now possible to build rich and functional web sites with minimal skill and web development capability.

In fact, this combination of WordPress and themes such as Headway are making the entire web site development and management process even easier and putting the capabilities to run a web site within reach of everyone.

A number of partners I am working with have made the decision to move their web sites across to WordPress and Headway and are already seeing the benefits in terms of lower cost of running the websites, more control over content, faster time to market with that content and better organic search engine rankings as a result of using WordPress and more importantly incorporating a blog in to their web presence.

And its even easier to then take the web presence and combine it with LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to build a consistently branded set of social media assets all focused on one thing.

Getting people with a need for your product or service to know like and trust you so that they try, buy and repeat buy from you and even more importantly refer others to you.

The secret to demand generation today is not for your people to be focused on finding prospects but for your company to be found by people who are looking to buy a product or service like yours.

And heres the good news, going down this path can be incredibly cost effective – most of the web sites I have helped partners to build have been created for less than $2 000 US dollars – including the cost of 2 years hosting, design of the WordPress presence and the branding of the social media sites.

Once the basics are done, the whole content management process is very straightforward as well. Through the use of various WordPress plug-ins and widgets its very easy to extend the functionality of the web site to incorporate registration forms, newsletter sign ups from services such as Constant Contact and AWeber to name a couple of email marketing solutions as well as content syndication across other sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

And at SAP we are also about to launch a service for partners providing content that can be published in to a WordPress based site via a simple plug-in.

So there are lots of great reasons to go down this path – to see an example of what can be done, check out the site of Sydney based SAP Business One partner, Leverage Technologies – www.leveragetech.com.au as well as their social media presence on YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter. You’ll see an example of how all these components can come together.

And the side benefit has been that just by using the search engine optimization functionality that is standard inside the Headway theme, the Leverage team have seen their organic search ranking (that’s the non paid search results) climb even higher.

If this sounds interesting to you and you would like to know more about the process, let me know – I would be more than happy to discuss how this approach can work for you too.

In my next blog post I will talk about some of the ways to simplify your web presence and why and all singing and dancing web site may well be working against you.

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