WordPress has been around for quite a while. BayArea-Web has offered it for free to all of our hosting customers for the last few years, and now we’re taking it further. Over the next few weeks we’re going to be rolling out a whole new way of running your business or personal website.

What is WordPress?

According to wikipedia, WordPress is an open source CMS, often used as a blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system. Used by over 300 of the 10,000 biggest websites, WordPress is the most popular blog software in use today.

It was first released on May 27, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of September 2009, it was being used by 202 million websites worldwide.

A few years ago people would have commented that they either never heard of it or if they were in the know, they would tell you it was blogging software. Over the next couple of years it started to grow in popularity and with the advent of Widgets and Plug-ins it started to become accepted as a Content Management System CMS.

More recently it has become one of the most popular ways to manage your business website.With all of the customization that can be done there are many times that you’ll be at a business site and have no idea that it is a WordPress site.

It’s Free!!! Sort of…

The WordPress software / program itself is free. It is an open source product which means that it’s free to use and has a fantastic support community. You can actually have a free WordPress site with free hosting at the WordPress website, although there are quite a few limitations as to what you can do. For instance, one of the biggest limitations is that you cannot use your own domain name (yourcompany.com) and you will have to use something like www.wordpress.com/yourcompanyname. This is fine, but it will never help with branding you or your business.

Another major drawback to hosting at the WordPress site is the lack of being able to add plugins and widgets to your site.  With their hosting they give you a handful of things that you can use, but they seem to want to encourage you to get hosting elsewhere.

The bottom line is that if you want to use your own domain name (yourcompany.com) and have access to all of the thousands of widgets, plug-ins and themes, you need to have a third party host your site. You’ll also need someone with some design skills to design you a custom theme and layout for your site. Working with theme building using tools such as Dreamweaver is not for the faint of heart.

What are your options?

There are many fine companies out there that offer WordPress hosting at reasonable pricing. However, you get what you pay for. If you are savvy enough to be able to program your own theme and know how to setup hosting and change DNS settings, your probably fine with a low ball hosting provider. If, on the other hand you are like most business owners you don’t really want to know or learn how to build a site. However, you know that you need one. You probably also realize that there’s an opportunity to network using some of the social media tools and networks such as FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, Linkedin, but don’t really know where to start. You are also looking for the lowest cost solution that will give you the best results while providing you with the support and confidence you need for running a business website.

BayArea-Web wants to be your WordPress Solution Partner. We can help you with everything you need from start to finish.

Here is what we offer:

1. Low cost monthly hosting – $7.95
2. Free WordPress setup and installation
3. Use your own domain name (yourcompany.com)
4. Unlimited email accounts and bandwidth
5. Use all the widgets and themes you want
6. Total access to there server level (for the tech people)
7. Web statistics
8. BayArea-Web offers custom designed themes or you can pick one from one of our many templates
9. Super-Fast turnaround time – We build your WordPress site in only a few days!!!
10. Optional levels of support and service for every budget

What all this means is that if you need a website for anything, BayArea-Web is your WordPress partner. We will get you going today with your very own WordPress site, custom designed, just for you.