What Is Wordpress

Wordpress For Dummies

What is Wordpress you may ask. Wordpress is a content management system (CMS) that allows the end user to change and update content and images on a dynamic website. Well in a nutshell it is. You may have noticed over the last few years that websites no longer are the static HTML pages that used to be the norm, and instead, sites are now a lot more interactive for both the reader and the person who updates the site.

There are several popular content management systems out there, although it has become apparent that Wordpress is king. There are many reasons for this and I will give you several now:

• Ease of use – you do not have to be a website programmer to be able to build a website anymore.
• Access to thousands of free or inexpensive Wordpress themes (designs).
• A back end administration area where you make all your changes, which means no more having to learn complicate web design software or paying a designer thousands of dollars.
• Versatility – you can bend and mold a wordpress blog to do just about anything by yourself, or cheaply through a programmer.
• Wordpress is free.

I have been using Wordpress blogs for a couple of years now, and initially it was the fact that it was free to use that got me interested. After several months of using it though, I came to realise just how much of a powerful tool it really is. Google loves wordpress it seems, and a blog powered by wordpress can be indexed and ranked very quickly in my experience. There are a lot of tricks I have learnt that you can do in the admin panel of a wordpress blog that will greatly improve you on page search engine optimisation too.

Get Your Free Wordpress Blog

There are a couple of ways you can get a wordpress blog, and by far the easiest to get started right away is to head over to wordpress.com and sign up for a free account and you can choose your own sub-domain and have your blog hosted on their servers. Unfortunately it is limited what you can do with a blog hosted on there servers, and to get the full wordpress experience, you need a self hosted wordpress blog on your own (or shared) server. When you have one of these, then you can create a powerful and effective blog to really get your message out to the world, and you also get to choose your domain name too.

So basically, that’s what wordpress is. Mind you it’s just the tip of the iceberg and there are a lot of tips and tricks that you will need to know in order to get a hot looking site that has credibility and looks proffesional.

Tags: content management system, search engine optimisation, theme, Wordpress