1.1 Why You Need a Website

Hi, I'm Andrew Childress, an instructor for Invototuts Plus. In this course, you're going to learn how to build a responsive website using WordPress and a custom theme from Invoto Elements. In the last few years, I've seen a lot of small business owners and freelancers skip building a website and switch over to having only social media pages on Facebook and Twitter. But many small business owners have seen trends for social media come and go, like Facebook now showing fewer posts in timelines. And don't forget, many people skip social media all together. And you can't just disregard them. You're going to have some people just searching for your site with a search engine and they need a place to find you as well. A website gives you a place to really tell the story of your business in a way that social media can't. If you're a freelancer, you can use it to showcase your best blog posts. Small businesses can really dive deep on the services or products offered on their site. While social media profiles are good enough to list your business address or post updates, they typically lack the ability to really showcase what you do to visitors. All of this means that you really need a website. Even if it's simple and contains only a few pages, a website gives people a place to land when they're looking for you. So what do you do when you need to build a website but you aren't a programmer. The answer is that we turn to pre-built themes that you can install on top of WordPress, a free content management platform that makes it easy. At the end of this course, you'll know how to build up our responsive website that looks great on any device. Let's dive in.