Dewell Marketing

Professional website design can cost anywhere from several hundred dollars to several thousand. As with anything, if you need it, want it and can afford it, go for it. If you are in the Puget Sound area of Washington, a great place to go for this is Heavy Guerrilla in Olympia.

On the other hand, you can be just effective, if not more so, with a much simpler and much less expensive solution. That is using a blog format from WordPress. Even if you already have a website, I would highly recommend you either switch forms, or set up a blog as a sub-domain of your existing website.

For example, your company website is http://www.MyBusiness.com; the blog portion would be http://www.blog.MyBusiness.com.

There are many places to get ideas of how you might want your WordPress blog to look. The “look” is called a “theme” and there are thousands of them, many of which are free. Some of the nicer ones, or ones that are more flexible if you decide to expand, cost something. As an idea, the theme of this blog, with the image slider at the top, cost me $75.00. I paid about another $120.00 for the professional help in getting the images in and the site set up the way I wanted it.

So, that’s very professional looking, easy to use website for under $200.00

Here is the main page for WordPress:
http://wordpress.org/

Here is where you can get free WP theme
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

For more variety, including themes that you would pay for:

Template Monster
(This is where I found the theme for this blog.)

Theme Forest

Studio Press

If you google “free WP themes” or “best free WP themes”, you can find many more.

One other point: if you use a hosting company for your present website that has what is called CPanel, you can launch a WordPress theme from the Fantastico feature, which is standard, in about 5 mouse clicks. Once you’ve got the site set up, you can choose another theme, or stay with one of the default ones.