Revamping Your Website: Wordpress FTW!

It sounds commonplace for 2013 (and even 2003), but whatever your business might be, you need to have a website that informs (potential) customers of your activities, products and services, but also enables them to reach you or your points of sell. Even in Liberia, a country in which less than 5% of the population has access to Internet, it is a must.

When I joined NATC, one of the first things I wanted to do what to revamp the website. That meant not only changing the look and feel and the structure, but also giving more flexibility to the business for changing/updating the website that you can find here.

So here are the different steps that we went through:

• Moving domain names registration and website hosting to Bluehost: the newafritech.com domain name was moved to Bluehost, which is also doing the hosting for the website. Having one provider for both services means lower cost, but for unlimited hosting and emails with an excellent customer service.
• Setting up a website builder: I chose to use Wordpress as a CMS/website builder for the website. Not only it is free but as a platform it offers so many possibilities such as pre-built contact forms, payment pages, membership pages and much more. 
• Using a pre-defined theme: As Wordpress is the website builder, you have the possibility to easily change the look and feel of your website by picking a pre-defined theme with functionalities such as photo gallery, sliders and much more. After quite some research on dozen of websites offering themes for $100 or less, we finally found one that has the right look and feel for our website.
• Writing the copy and select the assets: I worked with NATC management to find what should be on the website and what was the message they wanted to convey.
• Reviewing and testing: I spent quite some time checking every page, link and email posted on the website, making sure that everything work.

Now NATC has a well functioning website, easy to maintain and update, with lower hosting cost for a better service, all of this thanks to Bluehost and Wordpress. This is what I would call a good deal. So have a look at the website and let us know what you think.