About WordPress
In this lesson you will gain an understanding of what WordPress is, what it can do and why you should use it to develop web sites. You will learn about themes and plugins, and how they can be used to enhance you site.
WordPress is an open source website development and management tool written in PHP and MySQL. It is easy to set up and maintain websites with WordPress using plugins and themes.
Since WordPress is opensource it inherently supports and encourages customisation. These generally come in the form of pre-built plugins and themes that provide additional functionality and design elements for your site.
WordPress was originally developed as a easy to use tool to enable everyday folks to create and maintain their own bespoke blog without any technical knowledge way back in 2001. Since then it has become much more than a blog development environment, it has grown into a fully fledged website development and content management system. The developers aim was and is to focus on user experience and web standards to can “create a tool different from anything else out there”.
Why use WordPress?
Well, there are a lot of reasons for and against. Some find the template and theme aspect of WordPress restrictive, other find it incredibly useful and supportive.
Here are some reasons that we might choose WordPress for a suitable project:
- It’s free! For a lot of our students, partners and customers that is a huge benefit. WordPress is a fully functional, scaleable (with the right knowledge – check out our advanced WordPress courses coming soon), ready to use out of the box website development environment. There are a ton of free themes and plugins to let you achieve virtually anything that you need to do on a web site. And if you’re not seeing exactly what you want you can upgrade to a paid theme or plugin, that come with additional benefits of additional support and configuration options.
- It’s very easy to use. Like most computer based applications, WordPress requires a degree of – let’s say – technical expertise but if you can use Microsoft Word or manage your Facebook account you’re pretty much there. Using WordPress to create, edit and delete posts or pages requires little more than what you already know.
- It’s manageable from any computer, tablet or even a phone. Since WordPress is entirely browser based, as long as you have an internet connection and a computer you can manage your site from anywhere. You can also have multiple users and assign access or security levels.
- It requires no coding. WordPress has a fine tuned, user friendly interface that can be managed without any coding what so ever, so if programming is not your thing then WordPress may be your stress-free way to create web sites.
- It’s search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process that modifies a web site and its content to make it more visible and easily indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. WordPress is designed to be search engine friendly, and this means that your WordPress site has an immediate advantage.
- It has a huge support community. Like most opensource software, built by the people for the people, there are a lot of people out there who want to share their knowledge and experience of WordPress. In addition to the official WordPress support sites, there are a multitude of forums, blogs (build with WordPress of course), and support communities eager to help and advise those in need.
What can you do with WordPress?
The short answer is a lot! WordPress uses themes and plugins to easily add design and functional elements to your WordPress site. While these do not require any real coding knowledge, but if you were willing and able dig under the surface you can add a lot more.
Themes
A WordPress theme is like a template, it gives structure and visual design to pages. There are thousands of themes out there, many free and others cost a small fee. There is a theme for virtually every type of web site out there – photographers, magazines, eCommerce, portfolios… you name it, somebody has developed a theme for it.
Themes give you a lot of options and are customisable. The level of customisation varies from theme to theme but there is usually enough to help you make the your site look and feel right for you. Typical custom settings are colours (text, headings, background and so on), fonts, logos and page layouts. The best this is that these customisations require no coding, simply tick the boxes and select the setting you want.
Plugins
A plugin is an easily installed piece of software that provides additional functionality to your site. WordPress provides a special area in the admin panel for plugins, making it really easy to search and install them. Like themes, there are thousands of plugins that handle just about everything that you might want a web site to do.
WordPress can handle a variety of different media types right out of the box, and inserting media into your web pages of posts is as easy as clicking a button. Combined with an appropriate plugin, you can create photo galleries, video galleries, audio playlists, or any kind of media organisation for your site.
Summary
Throughout this lesson you have gained an fundamental understanding of what WordPress is, why we use it and what we can do with it. WordPress is an opensource Content Management System, or CMS, that started life as a blog management tool. We use Themes and Plugins to customise how sites build with WordPress look, feel and function.