There are so many platforms to choose from when building a website.

Do you choose a Blog format? Or maybe open source like Joomla or Drupal? Perhaps a customized feature rich enterprise content management system (CMS) from ektron? Or maybe even a home grown CMS built by a developer? There are so many choices out there. Don’t let anyone fool you, building a website is not always easy. There’s a lot to know.

Start With A Strategy

Think of your website as an extension of your business, organization or persona. Your website is your online welcome mat. Think in terms of creating an experience for your visitors. We encourage building stick-appeal which includes appealing visual content and valuable content.You want your visitors to remember your brand and come back to engage your goods, services or product offerings. Have some fun too.

Choose Your CMS

The CMS system you choose will need the functionality that supports your website goals and strategies. We decided to use a Wordpress theme because it offers valuable versatility. One of our main objectives in building our website was to engage more fluidly with our clients. We also want them to have some fun and be visually pleased. We prefer clean lines so our visitors eyeballs are’t popping out with too much data.

Mostly, we believe in building a brand so it is more social and therefore you will note we have all kinds of social tools. In the right hand corner you can see our daily tweets and also follow us on Twitter (we hope you do – say hello and we will be sure to follow you back).

Additionally we are streaming in flikr with “Social” pics. If you click the link it takes you to our humorous social pics. We’ll be adding more.

But more importantly, we are building a linking strategy with all the social outlets we engage. Why? Well, frankly, this helps our outreach on social sites and improves our ranking in Google.

Making Your Site More Social

Indeed, the world of marketing has changed. We encourage our clients to move into a versatile, innovative and cooperative brand rather than employing a slash-your-throat competitive approach when engaging in social media outlets. The world of social media is based on peer-to-peer appreciation. You certainly don’t want to be the thoughtless, uncorked righteous brand on the sites. Remember, you are making allies and building brand appreciation.

On your site, make sure to have some of the following so you can engage properly with your visitors:

• YouTube Videos
• Free Stuff
• Valuable Content
• Blog
• Twitter links
• Facebook links
• Social bookmarking links
• Page flipping brochure
• Smart phone compatibility
• Comments

Have fun and be creative. There’s so much to choose from with web 2.0 technologies. The landscape and apps are changing daily. We’ve upgraded our website twice in the past year and we still have more to do! Whew. Good luck.