If you do, or if you hire someone that does, you may reconsider after reading this post.

Is building it from scratch working smarter?

I’ve struggled with this for years. Deep down I tell myself that if I don’t build a site or web app from the ground up, then I’m probably going to regret it in the future.

However, as the internet develops and standard models emerge, there are some “tools” that are becoming the basis of almost every site I work on these days.

WordPress for Small Business. (Not just for blogging)

WordPress is one of the most flexible blogging platforms available today and you can download and install it for free.

What many small business owners (and web developers alike) don’t often realize are the many benefits of using WordPress for a web site foundation and/or a content management system (CMS).

Web Sites Without WordPress
When creating a web site from scratch, almost all popular options have to be custom developed. In addition, and because of the custom development, it may require experts for individual tasks like Search Engine Optimization, URL Rewriting, Content Management, Semantic and Meta Data, and Data Collection.

The Benefits of a Web Site on WordPress (or similar platform)
When you use a ready-built and stable platform to build a small business web site from (like WordPress), there are huge benefits. These benefits come in the form of time savings, cost reduction, marketing, ease of content management, and direct connections into the world of social media.

With WordPress (or similar platform) as your web site base, the need for custom development is almost completely eliminated. There are easy to install plug-ins for contact forms, built-in features for URL rewriting, themes and HTML structures designed for SEO in mind, simple content management, native registration forms, spam-guards, automatic pinging services that helps you engage social media web sites, and much, much more.

WordPress and Search Engines

Currently, Google is turning a focus towards blogs — especially when they are updated often. When you build your web site using a blogging platform, you have a better chance of getting indexed faster and possibly higher.

Other Platforms for Other Popular Models

Outside of the blogging model, there are two others that have a stable, free, and easy-to-work-with foundation package: Vote/Post (Digg-style) sites and Online Forums.

Both are similar in a way, the vote/post model is like a forum with the ability to vote on the posts.

Pligg

Pligg (www.pligg.com) is a content management platform for Digg-style sites.

Straight from the Pligg site…

Pligg is an open source content management system available for download at no cost. Pligg is based on PHP/MySQL, please see the server requirements list to check if your host is compatible with the latest version of Pligg. For additional support please visit the Pligg Forum where you can find help 24 hours a day thanks to our excellent development team and contributors. Pligg is free software, but you are welcome to donate any amount

Simple Machines Forums (SMF)

When you are looking for an easy to install and customizable forum system, SMF (www.simplemachines.org) is one of your best choices.

According to Wikipedia.org…

Simple Machines Forum (abbreviated as SMF) is a freeware Internet forum script. The script is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database backend, although multi-database support is being developed for the next major release. SMF is developed by the Simple Machines development team.

What does this all mean?

wordpress + pligg + simple machines forums = small business web site foundation for most situations