Why Do I Need a Website?

Any business, whether online or a traditional bricks and mortar business, needs a "place".

Somewhere their customers can go to see what's being offered, to buy stuff that they want or need and to hang out with other customers whom they've gotten to know.

In the offline world, this will be a building at a specific known address.

It could be a cafe, a restaurant, a hardware store or a shopping mall.

In the online world, it's your website.

It has a specific address, such as mybusiness.com, that people can "go to".

Which is a bit of a misnomer, because really the business comes to them.

How good is that?

It means that you can bring your business to anyone, anywhere in the world, who has an internet connection and, depending on how your site is set up, they  can buy your products and pay for them securely and they can interact with you and other customers in various ways.

But it all starts with your website.

Before you can build your own website, you need a domain name and a webhost as described in the two previous modules.

Now, building a website used to be difficult and complex. It required a knowledge of html (hyper text markup language) and JavaScript, the computer languages that were used to create web pages. And then along came CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to make things easier, but only if you already knew what you were doing.

But all that changed. How?

Because... along came WordPress.

Originally designed as a blog platform, to allow individuals to create a sort of online diary, WordPress is now used as the platform of choice for around 455 million websites.

And there are good reasons for this:

• You can build almost any kind of website using WordPress
• The platform is continually being updated and improved
• It's open-source architecture has allowed the creation of tens of thousands of plugins that extend WordPress's capabilities.

In the next lesson, you'll learn all about WordPress and its power.

Outcomes

At the end of this lesson, you should

• Understand why you need a website and that it's your "place of business"
• Understand that with the right techniques, your customers come to you
• Be grateful that WordPress has made it possible to create attractive, effective websites (as long as you have the right knowledge, which this training course is designed to give you).