Creating a Killer WordPress Site for Your Writing Service

Creating a Killer WordPress Site for Your Writing Service

Learn how you can create a “killer” website for your writing service by using the many great features of WordPress and a bit of ingenuity on your part.

You are launching an online writing service. You have your policies in place; you have your team of writers and customer support staff lined up. Just one small detail remains – a website. Well, actually, that is not one small detail. It is huge. As competitive as this industry is, you can not just have a pretty website. You have to have a powerful, compelling, selling tool. And that is where WordPress comes in. You should know that, as of April 13, 2017, almost 30% of all websites use WordPress. This is a huge share of the market space.

There is a reason why WordPress is the most popular website/blog tool – actually a bunch of reasons. Here are all of the benefits of WordPress and how you can use them to make your custom writing service site a marketing and revenue-generating machine.

Budget-Friendly

As a new company, it is always a good thing to save money wherever it can be saved. The key is not to sacrifice critical quality in doing so. WordPress can provide a stunning website for a Do-it-Yourselfer. Even if you hire a designer, when that designer uses WordPress, the task is much more streamlined ad far less time-consuming. The cost is less than building a site from scratch.

And when you want to make changes – replace text, add visuals, etc., you can do it by yourself with the administrative tools now available. If there are pricing changes; if you want to offer a special discount for a period of time; if you are adding more products or services; if you want to produce and upload a great new video – all of this is accomplished with no need to call the designer back in.

Consistency of Design

Because WordPress uses a theme approach, you can purchase a design that is pre-created or choose to have one that is custom-designed, if you have a unique branding in mind. That theme then stays consistent throughout all of the pages you choose to have on your site. Your focus can be on your content, and visitors will not be distracted by lots of different layouts.

Flexibility of Design

At the same time, theme consistency can be interrupted when desired. While you may not want every page of your site to have a different theme and layout, you may want sections of it to be different. You may want one theme in terms of layout but add different colors for different sections. This can achieve the effect of pointing visitors to the fact that pages within sections are related.

A good example of this type of flexibility can be found in the Jane Goodall Institute website:

There is an overall theme that is focused on live photographs – very colorful scenes feature Jane and the work the Institute does with wildlife conservation (especially chimps) and in the areas of women’s health. Other sections that relate to facts and data have a color theme but totally different layouts, featuring charts, graphs, and text. It is a good contrast of sections.

Ready for Mobile

It goes without saying that your site must be compatible with all mobile devices. Here is the great thing about WordPress. You will not have to design a completely different site for mobile and PC. Using a mobile responsive theme, basically a plugin, that will let WordPress automatically determine the device being used and configure your site accordingly. Given that mobile devices now outnumber PC’s in terms of web use, you have no choice here. Busy students will be on their phones and tablets, not sitting at PC’s, and WordPress makes access easy.

Content Management

Your writing service website will be an ever-evolving one if you are going to remain current and relevant to potential clients. And you will have complete ability to manage your content yourself. You can add, revise, and remove content at will. And you will find that adding content can actually be enjoyable.

A huge benefit of managing your own content is that you can stay on top of your industry. You can add new products and services; you can take customer feedback and make changes in policies and processes continually. These are the things that writing service review sites, like http://pickwriters.com, use to determine the best writing websites and recommend them to consumers. Staying on top of the latest developments in your sector gives you the competitive edge. You do not have to wait for a designer/developer to do this for you.

The other big benefit of adding new content on a regular basis, perhaps on your writing service blog, is that it will attract Google’s robots along with other search engines. Spiders will crawl your site every day and when they see new content and/or new pages regularly being added, they can be indexed, usually within hours.

Your WordPress site and blog can become a magnet for search engines.

SEO is Streamlined

There are great plug-ins (e.g. Yoast) that will provide an SEO analysis of your content, along with suggestions to improve it. Every page and post can be customized and optimized, giving the much greater probability of better positions on page results.

Engage Visitors with Media

With WordPress, you can add audio, video, even live streams if you should choose so. It can be easily accomplished, and will not only attract but will motivate visitors to share your content.

Speaking of Social Sharing

You can integrate your content/blog posts with your social media channels. Not only can you add sharing buttons all over the place, but you can automate what content appears on each channel. You may want some content to appear on Facebook and different content to appear on LinkedIn.

Security

This is a big issue with writing services. Client information must be protected; third-party processors must be SSL-certified. In the past, WordPress plug-ins were considered “unsafe” and vulnerable to hackers who could enter a site through them. But there is a “hardening” process for WordPress sites that provides the superior protections that you need. And as long as you make sure that you are getting the continued roll-out of security updates automatically, you will be “good to go.”

Managed Website Hosting – Automatic Upgrades

When you use plugins, which are basically software, there will be updates. If you choose a good “managed WordPress host,” this will happen automatically. If you scrimp on your budget in any area, do not do it with hosting. Pay the price to have a managed hosting service – it will save you many headaches.

Communication with Visitors

Like all other writing service websites, you, of course, will have methods of contact and communication. And many of them have blogs too – articles that provide interesting information/advice to visitors.

What you can do, however, that will differentiate you from the others, is setting up both sharing buttons and conversational threads, to encourage and even initiate discussions among your visitors. This is so easy to do with WordPress, and you can create much more “buzz” about your company when you work hard to involve visitors in your content. Others are not doing this – you can and should.

Organizing Your Website

This will be a big challenge. What sections, links, and pages will you have and what content/visuals will you include? For these decisions, you have plenty of models to look at. Certainly, you can review popular writing service websites, and get good general ideas. Remember, creating a killer website means you want to be unique.

Check out websites from unrelated sectors as well. In terms of layout, design, palette, these can also give you excellent ideas. WordPress.org publishes an annual listing of websites that have been voted the best. Here is one of its featured sites:

Now you may want more on a home page than this, but the design itself may give you some ideas about the layout.

You can also check out the huge number of themes from any number of sites.

The point is this: You do not have to re-invent the wheel here. WordPress has grown from a tool to set up a blog to a full-blown method of creating an amazing website with all of the features, elements, and plug-ins you will need to attract visitors, to engage them, and, even better, to get yourself on the SEO map.

The majority of visitors to any service website will not “bite” with the first visit. And your writing service is no different. They will explore and compare what you offer with other similar sites. You can offer cheap custom writing, but that will not be enough. They want to be wowed – by the design of your site, by its great organization, its navigational ease, its mobile compatibility, by the visuals and easy-to-read text, and by so many more things. When you use WordPress to design your site, you have all of the tools you need – all you have to add is your creativity.