The difference between a local business
and a major corporation.

Now you as a local business owner don't really need to know this but for those of you that have wondered why your site doesn't preform like a medium to large company the answer is money.

They all have website administrators or consultants, and their job is to do what your design company didn't consider it was their job to do.

Get your site ranked in the search engines for keywords that will help your bottom line and to make their website appeal to the customer.

The only thing is, these companies usually have at least several people working in this department and the average starting salary is around 85k a year for one who is good at their job.

The reason the company will pay that is because these people will make the company 10 times that amount minimum each year.

Now there are people who do this part time you can hire but for a good one they charge about $150 an hour, and without a complete design change it's not going to fix your problem anyway.

Your business website and wordpress 

A few things the design company didn't mention
You're a business owner and you're looking to for ways to attract new customers, clients, patients, ect. Well in this day and age that usually means hiring a website design company and using googles search engine to establish contact with those people who might want what your business provides.

So you probably put up half the fee for your site with the balance to be paid when the site has been approved by you. And the designer probably told you it would take a few weeks, no they probably said a month to build it.

They will probably ask you some questions about what you want the site to say, questions about you and your staff. They will want some images about the business you the business owner and your staff.

In a month or so they will show you the website and see if you want any changes done, if not they will publish it from whatever hosting company they used to build it and now your business has a web presence.

The website design company considers their job done and after collecting the other half of their fee you probably will never hear from them again.

So you wait a few months for your website to start bringing in new business, except it doesn't. You might think maybe it hasn't been long enough, or I'm sure a lot of other thing might occur to you about why it's not helping you business.

Now your first problem is you THINK there is a problem but you don't know what the problem is, your second problem is who to ask about a subject that's a little difficult to put into words. Now you could try to ask the designer who built your site, if he will take your calls.

I figure that's a 50/50 shot, mainly because they never promised you a business website that would help you get customers. I'd be willing to bet that subject never even came up and as for traffic to your site they never promised that either. You hired them to build you a website for your business, that's exactly what you got.

Whether anyone actually comes to your site is not their problem, because the fact is that most local business website designers have no idea how to do that. Because they weren't trained for it, their job could just as easily be done with a few days training by your average 9th grader.

First thing it didn't take the designer a month to build your website, that's just how long it took him to move your site to the top of the line, because with weekends off there were probably 20 other businesses in front of you.

Now I don't know how good they are at their job, (actually I do, and not very) but with the plug and play software most hosting companies have and a decent professional theme. I could do the same thing in about 12 hours if I wanted to do a really good job, and it wouldn't make your business a dime because unless you sent someone to your site nobody would ever see it.

And that kind of defeats the purpose of why you invested in one to begin with. So let me tell you what they probably did.

That business website, you probably spent a lot of money on is the result of someone working for one of these companies that with a little artistic talent and a few days of training can build you a really nice-looking website using just plug and play modules to make your website do anything you want it to do.

Now it doesn't matter if it's a site for selling your services as a doctor, or a law firm, or it's an e-commerce store selling hundreds even thousands of products.

All the designer needs are plugins or widgets that were designed by someone who went to college to learn how to write code and make their plugin's compatable with something like WordPress that actually builds the site with a few clicks of a mouse.

Now WordPress is the most popular website builder and almost all hosting platforms use it because it's so user friendly. And a lot of these widgets and plugins are open source (free) and the hosting company will have a section along with free themes for some of the most popular of these.

Building the site using WordPress
Now as I said WordPress is probably the most popular site builder if for no other reason, longevity and it's been updated almost constantly since it was created in 2003 as a blogging platform.
However over the last 20 years it has grown into a website creation platform that can do pretty much anything you want with the right plugins, and widgets.

Now one thing to understand about WordPress, it's main function is to write the code that goes into all websites. It's that code in different languages that tells whatever browser a person uses what the site is supposed to look like.

Now to build a business website using WordPress all your designer needs is a domain name (yoursite.com) that's it. Let me tell you what your designer probably did to build your site and probably charged you quite a bit of money to do.

First thing they did was open a hosting account somewhere like Hostgator, that's where your website is located on their servers. (price around $5.00 a month) Then you need to buy a domain name,
probably from the hosting company where your site is located. (price for the first year $10)

After your designer has your domain name and waited a few minutes or so for your domain name to be
live your designer went to the menu section of your hosting account.

He scrolled down to the email section and set up an email address for your domain usually [email protected] clicked apply and picked out which email program to use.

There are usually 3 or 4 and if he was really diligent in his job set that email address to forward all the emails to one of your business email addresses then he went back to the main menu section scrolled down the page a little farther to the software or builder section and clicked WordPress.

The screen will change and you will be asked for your domain name, the email address you just created, and a title of the site which can always be changed later. Then he or she clicked a button that said create, it might take 30 seconds or a minute, but you now have a website.

It doesn't have anything on it, and it hasn't been published to the web yet, but all the files and folders you
need in different languages have been created. Now the time it took your designer to do this, if it was longer than 30 minutes, he's new. Now you need a theme to give your website color, text, images, video, however you want it to look and respond for the user.

Now, one last thing about WordPress that as business owner you don't really need to know but I'm going to mention anyway. Mainly because I think you should know what you paid so much money for and why you didn't get the results for your business you were expecting.

That's why I decided to design this business model in the first place after all. Now back to WordPress, the first thing your designer is going to do is login to the dashboard of the site they just created. Down the left side of the screen will be a menu that will allow you to create pages, posts, comments, users, plugin's, tools,
settings, and other things to let the designer do their job.

Website themes
Your theme is what gives your website it's character, there are free theme's but for $50 to $100 a professional theme will make your site much more responsive to the "user" (your site visitor) and will also make it much easier for the designer to structure each page any way you want it to look.

I'm going to use Divi as an example, mostly because it's one of the most popular. There are a lot of others Elementor, Astra, and Avada to name a few but they all pretty much do the same thing and when the design company finds the one they like they buy the business version so their "designers" can use it on all the sites they build and the company only has to pay for it once. And it saves time so the designers aren't having to learn how to use different themes.

So once your designer has created all the pages you want the site to have in the WordPress dashboard, you upload the Divi theme and activate it which will add a new menu in WordPress so you can access the theme and start building the site however the business owner wants.

And it's almost as simple as building a Lego building for a child. First you add the sections or blocks you want for the page, these can be split in half, thirds, quarters however you want them to look.

Then each block or section is used for whatever you want, images on one side and text on the other. Background images, videos, title section, everything you see when you visit a website can be created
with these types of themes. But a designer with a little imagination and a few days of training can build these sites everyday. I myself (to make you a really nice one) can do one of these in a 12-hour day.

As I said your average ninth grader could probably do this job, and the designer doesn't need to know anything about the different programming languages that go into building a website.

And although this is a guess (but an educated guess) I would bet that the website design company you hired, most of the people working there don't know much more on the subject as well. So I wouldn't expect to find too many people there with a bachelor degree in programming languages, they charge too much for their time...