When a business owner or manager answers a question like "Where can I get more information, as I cannot find a business website for you?" with "We are on Facebook," they are losing business. Though it may seem like everyone is on Facebook, and that everyone goes there to find things to buy, that simply is not the case; and it is less the case as time goes by.

Content on Facebook is for all intents and purposes controlled and even sold by Facebook in some cases. Beyond that lack of control, the small business owner should not assume that even knowing that a business is only on Facebook will get someone to go there to get information. Even people who may use Facebook to communicate with family and friends do not use it to find products and services to buy. They want to find a business website. A business loses credibility without its own website.

Businesses without their own business website have no excuse. Often the owners say it costs too much or that they do not have the expertise to build and maintain their own site. Many who finally make the decision then go to a cookie-cutter site provider that makes it so easy they buy it. The problem is that the simpler the process, the less power and ultimate search impact the site will provide. Even a cookie-cutter site charging just $9/month is going to cost more than hosting your own site and using WordPress. Here are the five easy steps to get up and running.

Step 1: Get a business website hosting provider with one-click WordPress installation.

- WordPress is free software and enormously powerful. Using a hosting service like Hostgator, Bluehost, Yahoo, GoDaddy, or others, the business owner will own their space on the Internet and control their website. Using the host's one-click WordPress install will completely install WordPress and the site will be ready for customized content.

Step 2: Set Out a Plan for the Business Website

Build an outline of how the website should be laid out. Buttons for navigation by products, services, and other information about the business should be planned for and named appropriately. Determine the type of articles, product/service descriptions, and business information that should be on the business website and outline them.

Once those are decided, they can become categories for the site to help in getting the content organized for proper display and user-friendly information location. Build a comprehensive outline of page and article titles to help in getting a fast start on content creation.

Step 3: Organize the Business Website with Categories and Navigation.

- WordPress is a CMS, Content Management System.

This is what makes it so easy for the new user. With regular website design, one must figure out positioning on the screen for almost everything. With WordPress, once you set up categories and your buttons for navigation, all the content creator must do is to tell WordPress where they want new content and it puts it there.

Categories could be the main services or product categories of your business. By having a category for each of them, once you categorize the new post or article, WordPress places it in the appropriate place on the site and displays it properly.

Step 4: Create and Enter the Content for the Business Website

Now you fill the site with content text, images, and video that visitors will want in order to buy your products or services. You, a family member, or an employee can do the writing. Just use proper grammar and spelling. Keep content segregated into small bites for the search engines. In other words, if you sell Widgets, and they are broken out into Red Widgets and Blue Widgets, do separate content items for them. This gives your business website better search engine exposure and lets the search engine robots associate each page of content with a single product or service type of category.

The entry area for creating new articles or pages looks a lot like the word processors you are used to using. Inserting images and writing text is easy, and once completed and categorized, hit the publish button to have it go live on the business website.

Step 5: Now Use the Social Sites to Leverage Your Business Website Exposure

Once there is a viable business website, promote it through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The social sites do have value in leveraging the site content's exposure across the Internet. Use snippets from pages, posts, and articles to place in the social media and link back to the website.

That is all there is to it, though there will be a lot of work to get it done. Any business owner who wants one can have a business website for less than the cost of a cookie-cutter ineffective presence.