Work by sculptor Sun Shaoqun entitled "Beyond Space Time" in Wuhan, China in 2007

Last spring, I was reading the annual WorldBlu list of the most democratically run organizations in the world. One of the companies that caught my eye was one whose democratic organizational practices included eliminating a formal vacation day policy.

I remember making a mental note of the idea, because I liked it and wanted to keep it in mind as part of our plans for developing our business over time.  To me, it seemed like a logical extension of the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) concept, which has proven very effective at large companies like Best Buy, while having always been — at least to some extent — a natural part of my career DNA at almost every company I’ve ever worked.

This debate has recently been kicked into the spotlight, thanks to Netflix fairly high profile stand on this position — what started off as a simple presentation (see below) describing their corporate culture, quickly turned into a big debate on the specifics of their vacation policy.

A recent article in Business Insider, Henry Blodget inspired a great deal of commentary when he asked readers what they thought of the idea — most of the responses are in opposition to the idea of a no-policy policy around vacation days. On Entrepreneur.com, author Tanya Payne added a fairly dismissive comment by asking, “Is Netflix run by a bunch of hippies?”

I’m fascinated by this debate, in large part, because in my experience as a white collar, tech professional is that — whether or not it’s “official,” every place I have ever worked has done precisely this. The reality, however, is just that: this is not something that places with hourly staff, or huge organizations are likely to find either appealing or even terribly practical.  So, for me, the question is not, “Does a ‘no vacation policy’ policy make sense?”  But instead, “When does a ‘no vacation policy’ policy make sense?”

As someone who works in a geographically independent profession on dynamic, project-specific, virtual teams with entrepreneurs and small organizations, this is sort of an obvious no-brainer. Even more importantly, what I like best about the idea of a ‘no policy policy’ when it comes to vacation time, is the fact that forces team accountability: either the person taking a vacation makes the necessary arrangements to be covered while they are out, or the person who hired them has to acknowledge that their staff is not mature enough to handle the responsibility of being treated like an adult — in which case, whether or not that person should stay needs to be asked and answered.

I also like that it eliminates what can seem like arbitrary favoritism in a crisis. Several times in my career, I have seen different sides of this equation, and all of them support the reasoning behind a no policy approach:

• A co-worker’s husband had a massive heart attack and, as a result, she was out of work for about a month. She had neither the vacation nor sick days accumulated to cover her time off, but no one for a second questioned that. She needed to be home with her family, and — even more importantly — now that their income had just suffered a massive (and indefinite) hit, the last thing she could afford to do was to have to chose between paying the bills or taking care of her husband and kids in the wake of a family crisis.
• As I was leaving another company, my final paperwork indicated that I had a negative number of vacation hours, based on my accrual rate and the amount of time I’d been with the company. However, the person handling it “wasn’t going to make a big deal” about it, and let it go without docking my final paycheck the even out the number of hours in my vacation bank.
• During a particularly high stress time in my years with another company, my boss — being both perceptive and prudent — recognized that I was overly taxed and at the end of my rope. With a non-negotiable Thursday morning instant message, he effectively kicked me out of the office for the following week and told me to clear my head, get some rest and that he didn’t want to see me until a week from the following Monday.

In each of these cases, the “official” policy said one thing, but the culture of the organization over-ruled it when circumstances arose. I think that doing this is far more dangerous — and potentially rife with conflict — than simply stating, “We do not count your vacation hours. Be a grown up. Plan accordingly, and work with your team to make sure your responsibilities are covered.” Because at least that policy sets the expectations.

The problem with exception-based end-runs around official policies is that you can’t prevent them. But, worse yet, they are fickle. It depends on the people involved, their relationships, the timing, their responsibilities, etc. That is where I see the vast majority of unfairness playing out, because there is no way to stop someone from working out a special arrangement because of “special circumstances.” The trouble with that, though, is who defines what the special circumstances are, which ones warrant a special deal, and what happens when someone else’s “special circumstances” are dismissed as less worthy of special arrangements?

Of course, the flip side in my universe is that I am a workaholic who seeks out high-chaos environments where no one ever only works 40 hours per week. I also specifically work in smaller organizations with a lot of flexibility, where working from home is standard, and where expectations are different. If there is one thing I learned working in the airline industry, it’s that there are different rules for hourly customer service teams than there are for backoffice salaried teams. Is that fair? Probably not. Is it avoidable? If it is, it’s probaby only possible while an organization is still small. (And even then, I’m not sure I’d be willing to bet the ranch on that.)

So, while I find the debate over the no vacation policy issue intersting, I guess what I mostly find is that it’s ignoring a tremendously important factor: it depends on your team, your culture, your services and your business. As with many things, the smaller the organization, the easier some of these things are to manage this way. Often times, stricter, formal policies arise out of a need for clarity that comes from too many different managers managing too many different teams that have too many different people. Clarity is a security blanket.

I think there are better ways to accomplish that clarity that are both more fair and more respectful, but a formal policy can definitely have its value. But then again, so too is there value in a boss recognizing that a member of his team is burned out and needs some time off, whether or not they have the official hours banked to take it.

I guess the real key boils down to three vital questions:

1. What kind of business do you want to run?
2. What kind of people do you want to hire?
3. And what kind of boss do you want to be?

It is probably only with a specific combination of answers that a no vacation policy can make sense. But, I’d venture to say that where it does make sense, it’d be hard to find a really good reason not to do it.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas

After you have performed your adjusting activities for the reporting period, the next step is to review your financial reports.

If you are new to accounting for your business or are just new to WorkingPoint reports, here is an overview of the Income Statement.

The Income Statement is the report most business owners use to gauge how their business is doing for a specific period of time because it answers the question: “Am I earning more than I am spending?” In the case of closing the books at year-end, the reports shows you how you did for the entire year. The Net Income line item at the bottom of the report tells you if you are making a profit (positive net income) or incurring a loss (negative net income). In addition to tracking profit, you can use the Income Statement (Profit and Loss) to spot trends in how your money is coming in, whether it is driven by season, product line or strategic marketing events and how your money is going out so you can budget for the future.

Here is a sample of the Income Statement report in WorkingPoint and how to read it:

Above the Line
Revenue earned and expenses related to the cost of selling your products or services (Cost of  Sales or COS) are commonly referred to as “above the line” items because they are what affect the profit of your business. For example, if you make a product and sold it for $1.00 and it costs you $0.40 to make the product, your revenue is $1.00 and your COS is $0.40.

In general, your COS reduces your taxable income so it is best to record all of your qualified expenses in your COS accounts as it make sense for your business and it falls within the law.

Accounts involved: Revenue, Cost of Sales

The Line
Gross Profit is “The Line” because it is what you have left over to work with once you take into account what it cost you to generate the revenue. This figure is generally your taxable income.

Accounts involved: None. This is a calculation only.

How it is figured:  Gross Profit = Revenue – COS
Using the same example as above, if you make a product you sell for $1.00 and it costs you $0.40 to make the product, your profit is $0.60.

Below the Line
Expenses and other income are often referred to as “below the line” because they just feed off the gross profit, reducing the profit to what you finally scoop up in your “net” to keep. Other income is considered below the line because it is revenue earned outside of normal business operations, so it is kept separate so not to skew your numbers.

Expenses, Other Expenses, Other Income

The Bottom Line
This is what you scooped up in your “net” to keep. This figure is transferred over to the balance sheet so you can track the amount you made or lost over the year.

Accounts Involved: None. Net Income is just a calculation.

How it is figured: Net Income = Gross Profit – Total Operating Expenses + Other Income – Other Expenses

A positive figure results in Net Profit; a negative figure results in a Net Loss.

Reviewing for 2009 Close
Review all of your account totals as displayed on the report. Make sure things look good to you and are in-line with what you would expect to see. If anything looks off, click on an account link to view the detail of the transactions that make up the total. You may have chosen an account by mistake or entered a transaction twice or make a data entry error in an amount, for example total should be $1.00 and you have $10.00. If you find errors, this is the time to correct them.

The Net Income as displayed on your Income Statement is the figure WorkingPoint transfers to the Balance Sheet on a regular basis. At year end, this figure moves to Retained Earnings and becomes a permanent part of your earning history so you want to be sure it is correct.

Next time, I’ll take you through the Balance Sheet.

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Stan Capps at Dalton Falls Golf:

Dalton Falls Golf is the best miniature golf course in north Georgia. We also have an outdoor Laser Tag field with 16 Laser Tag guns.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Eric Mandley at Official 4 Hire, Inc.:

Official 4 Hire Inc is an officiating service that provides high quality officials/referees at a low and competative cost.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

Happy New Year! May your new year be filled with health and prosperity!

The WorkingPoint Team

If you need to reach customer support, please email support@workingpoint.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible but most likely Monday.

So far this week, we’ve covered free tools for entrepreneurs ranging from building a website in WordPress, to collaborating with your team, to taking advantage of some of Google’s lesser known products. I’ll close up this short week by circling back to your website.

Once upon a time, people assumed that once you built a website that you were done. In the world of the social web, however, even if you did build the perfect site right out of the gate (which, in more than a decade of working in this business, I have never once actually seen happen), the fact is that on-going work on your site is critical for both your users and search engines to consider your site to be an active web property, instead of just one of the millions of abandoned HTML shells sitting out in cyberspace collecting virtual cobwebs.

Another important rule of the social web is that, unlike in days gone by, it is important for businesses to remember that your web presence cannot be limited to just your own website. You need to be where your customers are, and that includes social networks. So that’s where we’ll start.

Social Networks
Since this topic has been the media darling of 2009, I won’t belabor the point, but the bottom line is that if you have a business, that business needs to have at least some degree of presence within social networks. Even if it’s just within LinkedIn (you can create a company profile page), it is increasingly important to ensure that you are findable. You may struggle with your own search engine optimization (SEO), but sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare, Yelp, YouTube and Flickr don’t. Having a business presence there can help you reach customers who would never feel compelled enough to come looking for you on your company’s domain.

Note, of course, that when it comes to social networks, one size does not fit all, and that as soon as you make your business available in one of those venues, it is going to require some care and feeding on your part. So pick carefully, experiment and don’t be afraid to pull the plug if you find that it isn’t a fit. But if you do that, tell people who are engaging you there and then delete your profile. Don’t just leave an abandoned page.

Google
At the risk of sounding like a Google junkie this week, I will come back to two of the most valuable tools for website owners: Google Analytics and Google AdWords. Google Analytics should be pretty self-explanitory, though the more you get to know the system, the more sophisticated ways you can use it over time. (Particularly when it comes to things like campaign codes, novice website owners will often start discovering a whole new world of possibilities very quickly.)

Google AdWords, however, is a tool that website owners who do not do advertising often tend to overlook. I constantly hear, “Oh, I don’t advertise online, so I don’t need it.” For starters, I wouldn’t summarily dismiss the benefit of advertising online, but even if you are not yet ready to do that, AdWords Tools has a lot of great functionality that you can use for your site, even if you are not actually flighting ads in the system yet.

Compete
Another great tool for small businesses is Compete. Compete not only lends a third party perspective to your website’s traffic numbers (always a good thing to have when possible), but even more valuable is the fact that Compete will let you compare your numbers to other sites’ as well. Plug in your own domain, and then plug in your competitor’s. It’s a great way to help you set some goals for your site traffic that are meaningful and measurable.

Website Grader
This is my favorite website tool of all, and it’s made by the really smart, creative marketing entrepreneurs out of MIT who built HubSpot (which has a lot of other great packages for entrepreneurs). Website Grader will not only analyze your website and give you a grade for its SEO effectiveness (down to specific elements and recommendations on fixes to make), but it also allows you to compare your site to someone else’s.

The team at HubSpot has a lot of other fun Grader products as well — including Facebook, Twitter and Press Releases, just to name a few.

So with that, I will wrap up this week’s series on free online tools for entrepreneurs. As I mentioned earlier this week, there are a few great sites out there that cover this topic regularly and can help you stay on top of new solutions hitting the market.

I hope that you have a safe and happy New Year, and we at WorkingPoint look forward to an exciting 2010.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas

In yesterday’s Entrepreneur Evangelist post, I highlighted a list of collaboration tools for small businesses, including the ever popular Google application suite. Today, the tools I want to cover are five other valuable applications from Google that I’m always surprised to discover people are less familiar with.

Google Patent Search
Does your business have a piece of technology you are considering patenting? While it will probably never replace sound legal help, it’s a good place to start doing your own patent research. Take a quick look to see what other patents might already exist that are similar to yours to see if it looks like it is worth speaking to an attorney about moving ahead.

Google Moderator
One of the greatest ways to get feedback from your customers or online community is to give them a tool that allows users to crowdsource information and then vote the alternatives up or down. Whether you are voting on product features, special event dates, promotional opportunities or a new company slogan, Google Moderator is a great way to engage your user base and get their feedback.

Google Squared
Have you ever wanted to research a comparison of information? Perhaps comparing products or vendors? Give Google Squared a shot. By typing in what you are looking to compare, Google Squared builds a dynamic ‘spreadsheet’ comparing various common data elements (such as manufacturer, price, product highlights, etc.) into an easy-to-read format so that you can compare one to the other. It doesn’t always pull in the information I’m most eager to see, but it is usually a really good start.

Google Local Business Listing
You can ‘claim’ your business using Google’s Local Business Listing tool. Not only will this help local customers find both your services and your actual location, but it also helps lay the groundwork for collecting ratings and reviews from your customers. Additionally, it helps with building some credibility online by demonstrating that you are, indeed, a real business.

Google Voice
Formerly Grand Central, Google’s new phone service is a great tool for freelancers and geographically distributed teams.  Google Voice is a highly configurable system that allows you to set up your phone system in whatever way makes the most sense for you and your business: you can route in-coming calls to multiple people, you can set up different voicemails to be served to different callers, and you can decide on the fly if you want to accept a call or roll it straight to voicemail.

Another benefit of Google voice is that all voicemails are transcribed with Google’s voice-to-text software and then emailed directly to you. So, if you’re like me and hate listening to voicemail, you can still get your message by reading your email. And if you want to listen to the message, you can also do that from your email. You can even log into the system and manage historical messages via an online dashboard, instead of having to call in and handle it by phone.

The less obvious benefit of Google’s text-to-voice capability is making notes for myself while I’m running errands. I simply call my number, leave myself a voicemail, and the system will transcribe it and send me an email, so I can follow-up later. I’ve even written more than a few blog articles that way, while sitting and waiting for appointments.

Google’s got a host of goodies that can be great tools for small business. Some of them are obvious — such as Webmaster Tools, Apps and Analytics — but some of them are a little less well-known, but definitely worth some investigation. So when you have a moment, check out the additional functionality from Google, and if you really want to dig deeper, check out what’s going on in Google Labs. There’s always something interesting brewing, and more than a few of them have potential to help entrepreneurs build their businesses.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas

In my last post, I covered adjusting entries and how you can use the Adjusting Entry form in WorkingPoint to account for depreciation and other end-of-reporting-period adjustments. In addition to adjusting entries, closing entries are made to “close-out” certain accounts balances at year-end and move them to Retained Earnings.

Before computerized accounting, accountants would manually record closing entries in temporary accounts (such as income, expense and dividend accounts), so the account balances would be reset to zero for the start of the next period. The entries would effectively zero out the individual account ledgers and increase a holding account called Income Summary.

The final step in completing the closing entries was zeroing out the Income Summary account and moving the balance to Retained Earnings. The Retained Earnings account value is, essentially, an accumulation of your profit that is retained by the business instead of being paid out to investors. Retained Earnings are viewable on the Balance Sheet report and reflect the amount retained by the business over the life of the business.

Today, in computerized accounting, much of this is done under the hood. No longer do you have to transfer balances from one account to a holding account and then move the holding account to Retained Earnings.

In WorkingPoint, we don’t consider income and expense accounts temporary. So unlike other popular systems, we don’t zero out the balance in the accounts. You can always see the amount you have earned or spent since you began using WorkingPoint to manage your business activity. You can always change the view of your activity lists so you can filter the activity for a specific date range but you’ll also always be able to see how much you have earned or spent to-date at a glance from the Accounts List. Reports also will show you the activity for these accounts for any date range you specify.

Even though we don’t zero out the account balances in your activity lists, we do zero-out your Net Income account and move the balance to Retained Earnings at the end of your fiscal year. By zeroing out your Net Income, you can start fresh for the new year and you can track the amount of profit retained by the business over the life of the business.

So, sit back and relax and know that WorkingPoint is handling your closing entries for you!

Now that your adisting and closing entries are take care of, it’s time to review your financial reports. In my next post, I’ll walk you through the Income Statement: one of the top financial reports and a necessary one for filing your income taxes!

The word “collaboration” is one of those hot buzzwords in the online space, and for good reason: Web 2.0 has, at its core, the ability to make the rapid communication and execution of action (whether work or play) much easier than previous forms of technology ever accomplished.

With the social web we can connect in real time, using video, audio, text and shared visibility of documents with multiple people at the same time. This is a game changer when it comes to getting work done: people no longer have to be in the same place to work together and collaboration can truly be a collective experience, instead of a one-way braodcast of information.

So today’s free toolsets for entrepreneurs are about collaboration, and I’ll cover a handful of my favorites.

SocialText
If you are often overwhelmed by email from within your team, I’d recommend taking a look at SocialText. Think of it as a private version of Twitter, just for your team. SocialText allows team members to use a microblogging format to communicate with each other, without overflowing your Inbox.

And, of particular value if you are working with geographically distributed or more dynamically organized teams, SocialText also supports user profiles and social networking that helps your team identify who’s who and help streamline finding the right person when it’s time to ask a question.

Scribblar
Whether you are training employees or clients, or reviewing documents together, Scribblar has some great features in their free package that make it a very useful platform for collecting feedback or brainstorming together as a team — no matter how far apart you may be.

With a real-time whiteboard that users can mark-up, the ability to upload images, conduct live audio or text chats, Scribblar is a great way to mock-up designs, review page layouts, prepare presentation materials or train someone on a new system.

Zoho
One of the best suite of collaboration and small business tools online is Zoho. Whether you are looking for a client relationship management (CRM) solution, or a project management tool, or a basic human resources information system (HRIS), creating online reports or database-driven applications, Zoho is one set of solutions that no small business should over-look.

While many of the solutions that Zoho offers are similar to some popular products by Google (including shared documents, spreadsheets, presentations and email), Zoho is constantly developing new solutions to help small business customers, including their new Applicant Tracking System.

ooVoo
If you have a geographically distributed team who works from home in their underwear, then ooVoo might not be everyone’s first choice. However, if — like many people — you find that your team communicates better when you can see body language (and are all confident that everyone is paying attention to whomever is speaking), then you may want to give video conferencing a try.

Yugma
The online presentation space was once owned by WebEx. These days, there are a number of solid competitors that offer a number of different tools. One of my favorites is Yugma. If you have a sales presentation, a client review session or an online training to conduct, Yugma allows up to 20 participants on a free account.

DimDim
Webinars can be great tools for small businesses: whether you are training employees, reviewing new functionality with clients, or conducting a free demonstration for marketing purposes, webinars are often a great tool to reach audiences that are not in your own neghborhood. DimDim‘s free solution allows you to leverage the power of a webinar for up to 20 people for free.

Google
Of course, the mammoth player in the free online collaboration space is Google. Whether you want to build an intranet site with Google Sites, whether you want to use Google Apps to host your company email and calendar, whether you want to use Google’s Blogger to build an internal blog for collaboration, whether you share and store your team documents in Google Docs, or whether your team works together in Google Wave to solve a problem in real time, Google’s suite of applications is another one that small businesses can’t afford to miss out on.

The one downside to Google, however, is that not all of the functionality is available via Google Apps. Some of the things that small businesses come to Google for require a Gmail account, and are not linked to your Google Apps account. Things like Google Analytics, Google AdWords and Google Reader are the three Google tools I use most, but which are not part of my Google Apps account (which is unfortunate).

All in all, the ability for teams to collaborate effectively is one of the things I find most exciting about in the online space.  Even better, sites like Mashable and WebWorkerDaily make a living by staying current and sharing new discoveries with their readers, which makes it much easier to find new solutions to help you with the challenges of growing your team and your business.

Some of the most creative and talented people I know and enjoy working with are more than 1000 miles away. Even as little as five years ago, the tools to make long-distance collaboration a fairly smooth process were not yet mature. Now, the market is awash with options — all you have to do is find the right one for the job at hand.

So what is your favorite online collaboration tool?

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

The single biggest struggles I encounter with entrepreneurs trying to build a business is marketing.  Some small business owners don’t think about it; some don’t understand it; some don’t like it; some cling to the belief that it simply shouldn’t be necessary, as long as their product is good enough.  One way or another, though, marketing is always one of the first places entrepreneurs request help.

And though “marketing” is a broad discipline, one of the best places for many entrepreneurs to get started is their own website.  A website is to business today, what the phone book was in 1985.  And yet, despite all that, according to Carol Tice of Entrepreneur.com, a full 46% of small businesses still do not have a website.

Even more importantly, however, is that — if you chose carefully — your website can be an inexpensive place for you to test your message, develop your content and start reaching out to your customers without the extreme expense of traditional marketing and/or advertising campaigns.  And once you’ve had the chance to hone your material, then you can look at how else you can use it.

So, as promised last week, my focus for the final week of 2009 is going to be on the free tools that every business owner can use to help their business.  When it comes to my work with entrepreneurs, I usually start most clients off with one key recommendation: WordPress.

While most people know WordPress as a blogging application, the fact is that it is a fully matured content management system that makes managing your website far easier than attempting to deal with a custom coded site.  While some large-scale websites may need more advanced functionality, most entrepreneurs that I work with who are focused on getting their first site up and running find WordPress to meet their immediate needs.  Even better, your actual core WordPress functionality is free.

Here are a few quick steps to getting a business website up and running on WordPress in less than 2 hours:

Step 1: Select a hosting provider. (Low cost providers are fairly easy to come by.  My recommendation is to go with one that uses Simple Scripts.  It is a utility designed to help you manage installations of a host of applications on your domain.)

Step 2: Purchase your domain.  This can be done as part of your hosting provider purchasing process.  Many providers will even register a domain for you for free as part of your sign-up package.

Step 3: Once your purchase is complete, log into your administrative system and go into Simple Scripts.  Find WordPress.  Select the option for it to “install” in your root directory.

Step 4: After your installation set-up is complete, log into your WordPress admin and go to Settings –> Permalinks.  Under “Common Settings” select “Day and name.”  Hit save.

Step 5: Activate Akismet.  Akismet is a WordPress-built comment spam system.  Unless you want tons and tons of porn spam comments clogging up your website, make sure you turn on this Plugin.  In order to do that, you will need to go to WordPress.com and create an account (or login if you already have one).  Once in, select “My Account” from the main navigation, and then click on “Edit Profile.”  The alpha-numeric code you need (your API key) will be right at the top.  Copy it, and then paste it into your new WordPress install on your domain, in the Akismet settings page.

Step 6: Go to Appearance –> Plugins –> Add New.  This will give you a menu of different plugins that you can add to your installation of WordPress to help you customize it and get the functionality you need for your business website.  Some of the common plugins I recommend include the following:

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Google Analytics for WordPress
3. XML Sitemaps

I recommend these as starting points for new site owners, because they are extremely important in both driving and understanding traffic.  Additional options that I personally use are plugins for social network activity and “related post” plugins that recommend other articles that are similar to the one the reading is currently viewing.

You’ll need to follow the instructions for each of the plugins to make sure they are properly configured once installed.  Good plugins will walk you through the process, so as long as you follow the instructions, you should be able to get things set up fairly quickly.  (And remember, in a worst case scenario, you can always delete the plugin and then reinstall it, if there is a problem.)

Step 7: Pick a “theme.”  In WordPress-speak, a “theme” is the design of your site.  There are, literally, thousands of themes to choose from, many of them are free.  And even “premium themes” are reasonably affordable, ranging anywhere from $20 up to $200.  I recommend starting with something free, and going from there.  The first place to start looking for themes is within the WordPress admin itself.  Under Appearance –> Add New Themes you will find a menu that allows you to browse different themes, see what you like, and install them to try them out.

If you want to use a theme from a different location (such a Woo Themes, which is a popular seller of business themes for WordPress), you will need an FTP utility that allows you to transfer files from your computer up to your hosting provider.  An application such as FileZilla is also free, and comes with easy instructions that can walk you through the process.  (And any theme you download from another website will also give you instructions on where to upload it once you need to move it into place.)

Now you’ve got a website.

Of course, while this first part is what intimidates many non-technical people, the fact is that installing the site is actually the easiest part.  The hard part is developing your content — what needs to be on your site, what makes sense for your customers, and how should it be organized to be both findable and valuable.  Later this week we’ll cover more tools to use to help you manage your website and develop its content.

A couple of last words of advice on setting up your site with WordPress:

• Use a secure password that you can remember.  Far, far too many people either leave a default password in place (which they can never remember) or use one that is too simple (which can easily be hacked).  Keep in mind that this is your business website, and treat your password appropriately.
• WordPress issues updates to the code fairly regularly.  It is important to try to stay current, because a great many of the updates are security related.  Once the basic WordPress installation has been upgraded, often the plugins will need to be next.  You will get messages whenever you log into the admin, so just follow their instructions and you should be fairly safe.
• WordPress is very easy to get comfortable with, even for the least technical people.  So play around in the admin (or, even better yet, set up a second install in another directory on your website, so that you can experiment without damaging your main website).  To learn more about WordPress, I recommend checking out Yoast.com. Yoast is a site all about WordPress and maximizing it’s value.  There are tutorials, information, recommendations and a great deal of content there for someone trying to get up to speed on how to get the most out of their WordPress install.

Finally, many people ask if they can use free WordPress hosting for their blog. For businesses I strongly discourage this for a couple of reasons:

• Free WordPress hosting does not get your site running on your own domain, which is vital for your search engine optimization (SEO).
• Free WordPress hosting has a very tight number of themes that you can chose from, and you cannot modify them without paying.
• Free WordPress hosting has storage space limitations that could limit some of your multimedia options for posting content.
• Free WordPress hosting does not allow you the opportunity to generate any revenue through advertising.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.