WordPress- An overview

1. 

About WordPress

WordPress is the most popular way to build a website for a reason. If you want to build any type of website, WordPress is a great option. Technically speaking WordPress is an open source (CMS) licensed under GPLv2, which allows the users to create dynamic websites, static websites and blogs as per our needs. Presently WordPress is the most popular blogging system on the web. It allows updating, customizing and managing the website from its back-end CMS and components quite easily and efficiently. It was developed by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003 and in 2009 it was announced as open source in October 2009.

What kinds of websites can you create with WordPress?

Some years ago, WordPress was primarily a tool to create a blog, rather than more traditional websites.  Nowadays, thanks to its massive updates in ecosystem through plugins and themes and along with code changes in its core, you can create any type of website with WordPress. For example, not only does WordPress power a huge number of business sites and blogs, it’s also the most popular and easy way to create an eCommerce store as well. With one of its plugin called woocommerce. With WordPress, you can create:

1.     Business websites
2. eCommerce stores
3. Blogs
4. Portfolios
5. Resumes
6.  Forum      
7.  Social networks
8. Membership site.   
9. And any type of website that you desire..

WordPress is used by?

WordPress is used by individuals, big businesses alike. Here are some of our favourite examples who use wordpress

• whitehouse.gov

• Microsoft

Microsoft uses WordPress to display its official blog. It also uses WordPress to display blogs for its specific products like Windows and Skype:

Understanding Content Management System (CMS)

The Content Management System (CMS) is a software which simply stores all the data namely text, images, music files, documents, etc. and make them available to your website. It helps user to edit, publish and modify the content of the website in an easy way. WordPress is an excellent example of this type of software.

Following are the features of WordPress

1. User Management and authentication – The most important purpose of the user manager is authentication. It also allows managing the users, which involves changing the role of the users to (subscriber, contributor, author, editor or administrator), creating or deleting the user, changing the password and user information.
2. Media Management − It features tools for managing the media files and folder, through which you can easily upload, organize and manage the media files on your website.
3.   Theme System − It gives us the feature to modify the look of the site, adding certain sections change its style through template files and custom pages templates.
4.   Plugin Support – Several plugins are available which provides custom functions and features according to the users need.
5.   Search Engine Optimization − It provides several search engine optimization (SEO) tools which makes on-site SEO simple.
6.   Multilingual Support − It allows translating the entire content into the language preferred by the user.

Advantages of using WordPress

• It is an open source platform and available for free, you will never have to pay just to use the WordPress software, which isn’t the case with alternatives you can also find lots of open-source plugins and themes to change how your website looks and functions.
• WordPress is extensible, even if you aren’t a developer, you can easily modify your website thanks to WordPress’ huge ecosystem of themes and plugins. Themes – these primarily change how your website looks. Plugins – these primarily change how your website functions. Plugins can be something small, like a contact form, or huge, like creating an eCommerce store. Currently, there are over 50,000 free WordPress plugins and 5,000 free WordPress themes, as well as tons of premium options. That to say – you have plenty of choices.
• WordPress Is Flexible. Want to add a forum to your existing WordPress site? No problem – just install the bbPress plugin! Want to add a social network? No worries! Just use the BuddyPress plugin. You are never limited to perform a specific set of functions – you can always adapt and evolve.
• It’s easy to Find WordPress Help because WordPress is so popular, it’s easy to find help if you ever run into any issues. There are heaps of Blogs, Tutorials, Forums, Facebook Groups, Developers that you can turn to for free and paid help if needed.

·        CSS files can be modified according to the design as per requirements.

·        Easily manageable for an average blogger.

·        It’s very easy to edit the content as it uses WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get is a user interface that allows the user to directly manipulate the layout of document without having a layout command).

·        Media files can be uploaded easily and quickly.

·        It offers several SEO tools which makes on-site SEO simple.

·        It allows creating different roles for users for website such as admin, author, editor and contributor quite easily as one of its features.

Disadvantages

·        Usage of several plugins can make the website heavy to load and run.

·        Sometimes PHP knowledge is required to make modifications or changes in the WordPress website if you want a specific functionality.

·        Updating WordPress version sometimes can lead to loss of data, so a backup copy of the website is required.

·        Modifying and formatting the graphic images and tables is difficult.