As I’ve blogged here many times, WordPress is a great platform to build a winery website. But not every winery needs a large website, especially as they get started. So here is the recipe to start a WordPress powered website that will cost you $15 a year (actually, it’s only $14.97):
1) Go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free account. Choose the default option to start a blog.
2) In the WordPress admin back-end, create a page named, “Home” and another called, “Blog” (you might also want to create a, “Wines” and “Contact” page while you are at it).
3) Put whatever content you have on all these pages. Since WordPress.com doesn’t allow for added plugins, you will need to use HTML for such things as a contact form. Google Docs has this functionality for free so just paste your code into the contact page using the “HTML” mode (not “Visual”).
4) Go to “Settings > Reading” and select, “Home” for your front page and, “Blog” for your posts page (click the other buttons like the photo in this post if you want, too).
5) Go to, “Appearance” and choose a theme that best matches your brand and then upload a header picture to personalize (if you selected a theme with a header image).
6) Under, “Posts” delete the auto generated post and then create a new post to start your blog.
7) Under, “Settings” click on, “Domains” and enter your desired domain name into the box and click the button. If it’s available, continue with the form and pay your $14.97 to register the domain and set your URL to this custom address.
Sure, you are limited to the themes provided but there are currently 77 and you can edit the CSS so there are a lot of possibilities. And the best thing is when you are ready to go to a self-hosted site all you need to do is export from the, “Tools” menu.
Times are tough but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice website or blog. All it takes is a bit of your time and some very inexpensive services (by the way, if you don’t mind the “.wordpress.com” at the end of your site URL you can build this same site for free).
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Nice post, Tim. I wish I'd written it.