How to Build a Better WordPress Website … One Week at a Time. The book takes its cue from the Japanese concept of kaizen, which means continuous improvement — or, to be more specific, the process of achieving sustained success through small, steady steps. Now, with that as our foundation, let’s talk about your website … The four pillars of a successful WordPress website Building a powerful website that does everything a website should do — help you earn authority, build an audience, and drive business — is a big task. Think about it this way: If you have useful content, a good design, and a strong technology foundation, but no strategy … your website’s “success” might actually be misaligned with your business goals. Now let’s marry together the two big ideas we’ve explored so far in this post … How to apply kaizen to the four pillars of your website’s success You can’t build a successful website with one inspired 48-hour work binge over a weekend. You develop, build, and launch your website in incremental steps … and then you continue taking incremental steps to avoid stagnation and drive your site toward continuous improvement. If you are intentional about avoiding the myopia that so many people approach online business with, then the time and effort, along with the money, that you invest into your website will not be an expense. Introducing the Sites podcast We want to help you make continuous improvements to your WordPress site while saving you the time and effort it requires to find all the best tips, techniques, and important developments that are out there. One step at a time. Sites is a podcast that delivers timely insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website that I described above: content, design, technology, strategy.
What is the key to building a better website?
Well, you first need an idea. And it needs to be useful.
Next, you need to start with the right stuff, the right raw materials. You clicked on the headline of this post, so perhaps you’re already using WordPress or strongly considering it. Good choice. Continue down that path.
After that, you have to be willing to hit Publish. Whether you’re starting your own food blog, marketing your copywriting business, or building an audience for your coaching services … you have to put your story out there on the web for all to see. That can be scary. It’s also empowering.
What comes next?
Find a path for continuous improvement
A few years ago, I wrote an article on Copyblogger titled How to Immediately Become a More Productive (and Better) Writer. A book I had just read called One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer inspired that post.
The book takes its cue from the Japanese concept of kaizen, which means continuous improvement — or, to be more specific, the process of achieving sustained success through small, steady steps.
This concept spoke to me then. It continues to speak to me now.
It’s so easy, especially in today’s environment of ubiquitous distraction, to get lost in big ideas and forget about the inevitable series of small steps it takes to achieve them.
I am easily prone to this. I’ve learned this about myself. I have to be intentional about pulling myself down out of the clouds so that I can actually plant my feet firmly on the ground and put one foot in front of the other … then the other … then the other.
Steps.
One at a time.
That is the only way to achieve continuous improvement — the only way to take a big, grand idea and bring it to fruition.
Now, with that as our foundation, let’s talk about your website …
The four pillars of a successful WordPress website
Building a powerful website that does everything a website should do — help you earn authority, build an audience, and drive business — is a big task.
There is a lot that goes into a successful WordPress website.
Some of the choices you have to make are big decisions, like where to host your site and what theme to use.
Other choices are smaller, more subtle, like what color to use for your call-to-action buttons and whether you should use “How to …” in two consecutive blog post headlines or change one for the sake of variety.
All of your decisions, big and small, can be categorized in one of the following four buckets:
- Content
- Design
- Technology
- Strategy
…
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