WordPress has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

You will  need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything.

What You Can Use WordPress For

WordPress started as just a blogging systems, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination. (And tech chops.)

Once you have registered your domain name you will need to host it somewhere.

Hosting packages vary depending on the needs of the website.  Most websites can use companies such as goddady.com or dreamhost.com.  Their prices start at around $9.95 per month for hosting and approx $9.95 per year to register your domain name.

These three words have never had a more important meaning than now.

Web users want their information quickly.  If you don’t grab their attention within just a few seconds, they most likely are off to another site to find what they need.  Clear and concise navigation enables the user to get to the section of your site quickly and easily.

State your message early.  Give the user what they want quickly.

Avoid unnecessary text and images that clutter and obscure your message and make the site ineffective.  If all you get is a few clicks from the user, then it is important to make them count.

Good quality images are important  to users.  Blurry, unclear images do not present your website well. In addition, other webmasters are much more likely to link to a high-quality image, which can increase visits to your site.  Crisp, sharp images will also appear better in the thumbnail versions displayed in search engine results, and may therefore be more likely to be clicked on by users.

Click these links to submit your site.

MSN

Submit your website URL to MSN Bing

Yahoo

Submit your website URL to Yahoo

Google

Submit your website URL to Google

(from google’s website)

• Submit your site  to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Design and content guidelines.

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.