If you want to marry someone do you walk up to them and ask “will you marry me”? Obviously not because there is no relationship. You must first start a conversation then slowly build your relationship with successive conversations and by serving them.
The same strategy works in online marketing. Visitors generally don’t buy from the first contact with your website. You need to interact and offer them valuable content so they’ll get to know, like and trust you. Once you’ve won their trust they’ll be more inclined to purchase your goods and services.
Creating an interactive website enables you to interact with your website visitors, build long term relationships, offer valuable content plus recommend your products and services.
How to create an interactive website
One of the quickest and easiest ways is to create a blog. It can be a stand-alone website (domain.com) or add one to your current website (domain.com/blog or blog.domain.com)
Steps for creating stand-alone blog
1. Register a domain
Go to Godaddy.com or your favorite domain name registrar to register a domain name for your business. Include your business name or one of your main keywords in the domain name (e.g drostdesigns.com) so it’s easy to remember and shows what its about.
2. Web Hosting
Find a web hosting service that allows a one click installation of WordPress. WordPress one of the most popular platforms for building an interactive website. Read Top 7 Benefits of WordPress. You’ll need approximately 50MB of disc space to allow room for lots of pages, images and other files and approximately 3GB of bandwidth to support thousands of visitors to your website. Make sure you can easily upgrade your hosting plan should you need more space and bandwidth.
3. Install WordPress
WordPress is the software of choice because it has interactive features already built into it. Some of these features include:
- Automatic pinging of the search engines
- RSS feeds
- Comments
- Automatic bookmarking of content
- Automatic newsletter subscriptions
- Multiple editors of content
- Blog directories
To install WordPress login to your web hosting control panel (cpanel) and click on the Fantastico icon. Once installed enter the domain name in your browser. The default theme will now be displayed.
4. Select a WordPress theme
I suggest purchasing a professional theme from Studiopress, Thesis or Wpremix so it contains no code errors, is fast loading, search engine friendly and easy to customize. If you prefer a free theme visit: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ to select from 100s of themes.
- Download the new theme to your desktop.
- Unzip the files. It will create a folder containing the name of your template.
- Upload this template folder to wp-content-themes folder
- Use FTP software such as filezilla) for uploading your files to the server
- Login to your WordPress administration panel, go to the design tab. You should now see your new theme displayed.
- Activate your new theme by clicking on it with your mouse.
- Enter your website address in your browser to view your new site.
There are many advanced strategies for customizing the appearance and optimizing your blog for the search engines, however start adding new content to your website immediately by creating new pages and posts.
Related articles
Benefits of an interactive website
Top 10 ways to make your website interactive
How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog
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