So What’s This WordPress Thing and Why Should I Use It?

Back in the olden days (that means the 1990s, when you’re talking about the web), building a website meant coding every part of every page by hand. It was slow, and it was easy to make mistakes. If you ever wanted to change the way your website looked, you had to go back and change each of the pages, so it took just as long as building the site the first time had.

The content of the site (text and images, and later audio and video) was all jumbled up with the design of the site (font choices, color choices, layout) and the function of the site (all the geeky back-end stuff that makes links connect or retrieves information when you search). It was inefficient, and it meant only people who knew HTML (and later Java and CSS) could edit web pages.

So every time you wanted to change so much as a comma, you had to call your web designer and pay more money.

Now we have content management systems (CMSes for short). The purpose of a CMS is to separate design, function, and content, so that people who don’t have HTML skills can edit the content without worrying about messing up the design or breaking the function.

There are lots of content management systems out there. Some are commercial, proprietary, and expensive, designed for large enterprises. Some are free and open source. The most popular open-source CMSes are Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress. Of these, Drupal is the most complex, and probably best for building very large enterprise sites, but it’s also the least user-friendly.

WordPress, on the other hand, is very easy to use, and it’s also quite flexible thanks to more than 10,000 plugins that add functions. It’s an ideal solution for building small-business websites quickly. Not only can the site grow easily with the client, but the client can easily update and add to the site’s content. No more calls to the web designer every time you see a typo.

Most people who have heard of WordPress think of it in association with blogs like this one, but using WordPress just for blogging is like buying a Swiss Army Knife and only using one blade. In fact, you don’t have to have a blog on your WordPress site at all—though there are some good marketing reasons to include one.

Look at our portfolio for some examples of distinctive websites built with WordPress. Then come back next week to learn more about ways to put it to work for you.

1 Comment

1. It is my honor to see your blog. I think it is very good. That helps me learn a lot about how to become a successful business, and I will tell my friends to read it.

   UGG Bailey Button
   August 30, 2010 at 8:12 am