Table of Contents
What Is WordPress
WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). This is a techie way of saying “a type of website where much of the work is already done for you”. There are other content management systems out there, including Drupal and Joomla, but experts and users alike agree that WordPress is the best. It was originally created back in 2003 as a tool for bloggers.
A blog is a kind of online diary or magazine. Since then, WordPress has improved and evolved into a tool that allows anyone to create just about any kind of website they want. Many small and medium-sized businesses now use WordPress, as do Hollywood stars and facebook blog Even large corporations like Pepsi, Ford Motor Company, and eBay This is because it’s easy to use and involves no programming on the part of the user.
WordPress is “open source software”, which means that hundreds of people around the world help develop it. It is free for anyone to use. If you can use word-processing software like Microsoft Word or Pages for OSX, then you’ll be able to use WordPress. It uses the same kind of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface to create and post content. All the coding is done for you by the built-in software, though you do have the option to fiddle with the PHP and HTML coding if you really want to. The WordPress software comes in the form of a series of files that are uploaded to your website’s server, where it works quietly in the background. You navigate around “behind the scenes” of your website and make everything work via a dashboard, which looks something like this:
You pick the look of your site by choosing a theme. Themes are templates that come preprogrammed with various design and layout options. There are literally thousands available and they can all be adjusted and fine-tuned in various ways. Many themes are free, but some (called premium themes) have to be paid for. For most purposes, free themes are fine.
What Are The Advantages Of Using WordPress?
The most obvious advantage of WordPress is that it’s super simple to install and easy to use. WordPress is also very search-engine friendly, which helps you attract visitors to your website for free. You’ll find that a lot of the hard work most new webmasters have to put in to get their sites listed by the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo is achieved semi-automatically by the WordPress software. If you decide you want to alter the look of your site you can do so in seconds by merely changing the theme. In the same way, you can add complicated functions simply by adding a new plugin. I’ll show you exactly how to do all this and recommend the exact same plugins I use on my websites.
