Tutorial 1: What is WordPress?

Starting our WordPress Tutorial for Beginners. WordPress is the world’s most popular open source Content Management System (CMS) used in over 70 million websites.

With thousands of plugins and themes available, this makes WordPress capable of creating any style of website, from a simple blog to a full-featured business website.

This is done without any coding or design skills to create a professional looking site.

WordPress is Free

The best thing about WordPress is that it is free and open source blogging tool. WordPress is free to download, install, use and modify it. WordPress is downloaded from WordPress.org.

With WordPress been open source, a large WordPress community maintains WordPress. Anyone can contribute to WordPress by answering questions, writing plugins, creating themes, writing patches and updating documentation.

WordPress is Easy to Learn

WordPress is fair easy to learn and use. With a strong WordPress community, will help in the initiate process should you ever encounter any problems.

If you ever have a doubt or a problem a simple Google search can answer your query

Don’t Need for a Developer

There is no need to have coding or design skills to create a professional looking website. There is free themes and plugins that are installed with a few clicks in the WordPress Admin.

WordPress makes it easy to install and configure, the tools that you’ll require to make your website whole are easy to handle.

WordPress is Fast & Secure

Hackers will always be looking for loopholes to exploit, WP makes their job the harder. The CMS been built with the best code standards to make it fast and impregnable in terms of security.

With WordPress receiving regular updates aimed at improving the code as well as seal security holes.

There is plugins available such as blogVault and plugins such as iThemes Security.

WordPress is Scalable

If your WordPress website becomes successful with loads of traffic, WordPress is highly flexible and scalable.

There might be limitations with your hosting provider as your website grows.

WordPress is Search Engine Friendly

With WordPress been built with the best web standards. With clean code, supports meta data, tags, categories, SEO-friendly URLs, and so much more including SEO plugins, the search engines like this.

Highly Customizable

What makes WordPress is that it is customizable so it meets the demand of many users with its flexible framework to allow designers and developers to create and modify layouts and applications.

You can use WordPress as the following:

  • Arcade
  • Blog
  • Content Management System (CMS)
  • Gallery
  • Portfolio
  • Rating Website
  • Video Collection Site
  • Shopping Store
  • Membership Site

What is a Content Management System?

A content management system (CMS) is an application that supports the creation and modification of digital content. The WordPress CMS allows the users to write posts, manage users, manage comments, install plugins, customize themes and much more.

By their nature, content management systems support the separation of content and presentation.

A CMS is way more than just a means to an end, you can install a theme which is a modified template to suit the specific niche and purpose of your site. With the template added, you can customize the appearance of your site.

You can add plugins to add function to your site, for example a social sharing plugin to help spread the word about your site via social networks.

All of this and more can be accomplished with a Content Management System.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

This is a funny one to explain the difference as their a lot of confusion created by the similar domains.

WordPress.org, is where you’ll find the free WordPress software that you can download and install on your own web server.

WordPress.com, will provide you with your hosting needs. You don’t have to download software, pay for hosting, or manage a web server. It’s free and easy to set up and you have lots of options for customizing your site.

The WordPress.com main hosting plans:

  • Free – Very limited.
  • Personal – $48 per year
  • Premium – $99 per year
  • Business – $299 per year

Who Uses WordPress

WordPress is not the preserve of any special group of people. From bloggers to web developers, small businesses, celebrities and multinational companies, all of them seem to have eaten the WordPress candy.

Wrapping Up

We hope this article answered any questions about What is WordPress. You’re missing out on a lot and we hope you can start blogging with WordPress soon.

If there is any feedback or suggestions please leave a comment below.