What is WordPress?

Okay, so you know what a blog is and you’ve been thinking of starting your own. You’ve heard of this thing called WordPress but you have no idea what it is. This article will define not only what WordPress is, but many of the amazing things you can do with it.

According to WordPress.org “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability”. Well, if that doesn’t make much sense to you don’t feel bad. Basically WordPress is a free script that you install on your website, it allows you to write articles and publish them to your site while automatically sorting them by date or category. That’s the essence of WordPress, but it does much, much more.

Side note: A blog is really no different than a website, in fact a blog is really only a fancy word for a web log or online diary, but with WordPress you can manage your site any way you like, it doesn’t have to be a typical ‘blog’. Did you know that this site is managed by WordPress? Although it’s not organized by date like a typical ‘blog’, the content is organized by category and most recent articles are placed on the front page. With WordPress you can organize your site any way you choose.

WordPress will practically build your site for you. It allows you to choose from various designs called ‘themes’ or ‘templates’ that define the layout, images, colors, and look of your site. WordPress also has a complete administration area that allows you to manage all the aspects of your site. You can create new categories, pages, change templates, add links, and more, all from the online admin interface. With WordPress you don’t need to know HTML although basic knowledge helps, and you don’t need a fancy web page editing software like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. With a website and WordPress you have everything you need to create a blog or content organized website.

Installing WordPress is a breeze if you are at all familiar with uploading files to your website. If that’s too complicated they even offer a hosted version that’s also free, no website required! Once WordPress is installed you can login to the admin panel and start customizing your blog.

One of the greatest features of WordPress is the flexibility it has. You can build your own template or modify existing templates to your hearts content. You can choose how many categories you want, where you want them displayed on your pages, you can let others write content for you and give them their own unique passwords as well as limit what they can do on your site.

WordPress also automatically integrates RSS into your site, this way people who have RSS readers can automatically subscribe to your RSS feed and get updated anytime you add new posts to your site!

My favorite part about WordPress is their plugins! Plugins are additional features that you can basically ‘plug’ into your website. Anyone can create a plugin, they are all free, and they can do a variety of things. For example I installed a plugin that built an entire site map for this website. Anytime I add an article to my site the page and link is automatically added to my site map. There are hundreds of other plugins that accomplish all kinds of things, and with a bit of PHP knowledge you can even create your own. You can find a list of plugins here.

So there you have it. You should now have a good idea of what WordPress is and some of its limitless possibilities. If you are new to all this and want a step-by-step guide to setting up WordPress the right way then you may want to check out Teli Adlam’s OptiNiche. It’s a complete guide to setting up and optimizing WordPress.