WordPress Can Do for You
In This Chapter
▶ Seeing how WordPress can benefit you
▶ Participating in the WordPress community
▶ Understanding the different versions of WordPress
In a world in which technology advances in the blink of an eye, WordPress really does make building websites easy – and free! How else can you get your content out to a potential audience of millions worldwide and spend exactly nothing? There may be no such thing as a free lunch in this world, but you can bet your bottom dollar that there are free websites and blogs. WordPress serves them all up in one nifty package.
The software’s free price tag, its ease of use, and the speed at which you can get your blog up and running are great reasons to use WordPress to power your personal blog or business website. An even greater reason is the incredibly supportive and passionate WordPress community. In this chapter, I introduce you to the WordPress software so that you can begin to discover how effective it is as a tool for creating your blog or website.
Discovering the Benefits of WordPress
I work with first-time website owners all the time – folks who are new to the idea of publishing content on the Internet. One of the questions I’m most frequently asked is “How can I run a website? I don’t even know how to code or create websites.”
Enter WordPress. You no longer need to worry about knowing the code because the WordPress software does the code part for you. When you log in to your website, you have to do only two simple things to publish your thoughts and ideas:
1. Write your content.
2. Click a button to publish your content.
That’s it!
WordPress offers the following competitive advantages as the most popular content management tool on the market:
✔ Diverse options: Two versions of WordPress are available to suit nearly every type of website owner:
● WordPress.com: A hosted turnkey solution; primarily used for blogging
● WordPress.org: A self-hosted version to install on the web server of your choice; used for building blogs and websites
I go into detail about each of these versions later in this chapter, in the “Choosing a WordPress Platform” section.
✔ Ease of use: WordPress setup is quick and the software is easy to use.
✔ Extensibility: WordPress is extremely extensible, meaning that you can easily obtain plugins and tools that let you customize it to suit your purposes.
✔ Strong community of users: WordPress has a large and loyal members-helping-members community via public support forums, mailing lists, and websites geared to the use of WordPress.
The following sections fill in a few details about these features and point you to places in the book where you can find out more about them.
WordPress is one of the only platforms that can brag about a 5-minute installation – and stand behind it! Both versions of WordPress take you approximately the same amount of time to sign up.
When you complete the installation, however, the world of WordPress awaits you. The Dashboard is well organized and easy on the eyes. Everything is clear and logical, making it easy for even a first-time user to see where to go to manage settings and options.
The WordPress software surely has enough meat on it to keep the most experienced developer busy and happy. At the same time, however, it’s friendly enough to make a novice user giddy about how easy it is to get started. Each time you use WordPress, you can find out something exciting and new.
I’ve found that the most exciting and fun part of running a WordPress website is exploring the flexibility of the software. Hundreds of plugins and themes (designs) are available to let you create a blog that functions the way you need it to.
All WordPress websites are pretty much the same at their core, so by using plugins, you can truly individualize your website by providing additional features and tools that benefit you and your readers. When you come upon a WordPress website that has some really different and cool functions, 98 percent of the time you can include that function on your own website by using a WordPress plugin. If you don’t know what plugin that website is using, try dropping the website owner an email or leave a comment. WordPress website owners usually are eager to share the great tools they discover.
Most plugins are available at no charge. You can find out more about WordPress plugins and where to get them in Chapter 7. Chapter 15 lists my top ten choices for popular WordPress plugins available for download.
In addition to using plugins, you can embellish your WordPress blog with templates and themes. WordPress comes with a very nice default theme to get you started. Figure 1-1 shows the default Twenty Fifteen theme, created by the team from WordPress, which is displayed by default after you install and set up your blog for the first time.
Figure 1-1: Start a new WordPress website with a theme.
The theme’s default style is a minimal, with a handy application built in to the preferences that allows you to change the colors and insert an image to use as a header image. (You can find more about tweaking WordPress themes in Chapters 9–12.)
Using some of the thousands of plugins and themes available, you can truly manage many different kinds of content on your website. WordPress is not just for blogging anymore (although it does still excel at it!). Although WordPress became well known as a blogging platform, you can use it to power diverse and dynamic websites that allow you to do things like develop an e-commerce site (selling products online), create
