What you need to know about WordPress before you start your first website
Are you new to WordPress? Here is a beginners guide to WordPress that explains everything you need to know about WordPress to take a decision on whether to go for WordPress or another platform to make a basic website for your business.
If you are new to WordPress, you must be wondering what it is all about. Well, WordPress is an online, open-source website creation tool written in PHP. In simple terms, it's probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.
WordPress is capable of creating any style of a website from a simple blog to a full-featured business website. You can even use WordPress to create an online store using the popular Woo Commerce plugin.
You've never built a website? That's not a problem! With WordPress, you don't need any coding or design skills to create a professional-looking site.
WordPress is an excellent website platform for a variety of websites. From blogging to e-commerce to business and portfolio websites, WordPress is a versatile CMS.
There are thousands of free site designs to choose from. With WordPress, it's easy to build your website without writing a single line of code or knowing anything about HTML.
Alternatively, if you are not sure of what to do in this case, you may consider utilizing resources like WPFixs. It's a WordPress development company that develops and provides support to your website.
How to get WordPress
Here's the best part: WordPress is free. It's both free to use and free to modify. So, if you are the sort of person who likes to tinker with code, you can dig in and make WordPress do just about anything you want it to do.
Unlike other "free" website tools, WordPress does not lock you into some proprietary service. You can host your website anywhere or move your site to another hosting service anytime you like.
Unlike traditional desktop software, WordPress runs online (in the cloud system). There's nothing to install on your computer Also, you don't need any special tools.
You can update your website from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Even with your smartphone things will work just fine. There are free WordPress mobile apps for iPhones and Android phones.
Should you learn to use WordPress?
Regardless of your tech skill level, WordPress is a powerful and flexible platform for creating websites and learning as you go.
You can start working with WordPress even if you have no background in WordPress experience or information. As your skills develop, you can start building more custom sites and unlocking a wider base of clients to build those sites for.
If you want to learn more about how WordPress works, start with free tutorials directly from the WordPress site.
Building a website using WordPress
When it comes to building websites, there are two direct ways to get the job done:
Some web developers build a site from the ground up with coding languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Whether you hire WordPress developers or do it yourself, WordPress makes it very easy to develop CMS based websites in a short period of time.
This approach involves creating individual web pages that are saved as HTML files and uploaded to a web server where they combine to form a website.
As you might have guessed, this method requires a lot of heavy-lifting, hand-coding and technical finesse.
The second approach to web development involves building sites using a content management system or CMS. A CMS is a software application that lets users create, publish and manage digital content online.
WordPress (the version that's free to download and install on your computer from WordPress.org—not to be confused with the blogging platform available from WordPress.com) is a CMS.
More specifically it's the industry standard CMS. In fact, 59.3 percent of people use it compared to competitors like Drupal (3.7%) and Squarespace (2.5%). This is according to a web technology survey site: W3Techs.
If you're using a CMS platform to build a website, there's a very good chance you'll be using WordPress. That being said, if you want to teach yourself how to use a platform, this is the most strategic option.
When you build a site with WordPress versus building with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, WordPress' user interface lets you preview and visualize your content as you'll see it online. This is different from the raw HTML.
Additionally, that content can be edited in WordPress and updated in real time with the push of a button. This is opposed to the HTML/CSS/JavaScript approach, where pages need to be individually edited and manually re-uploaded to a server whenever a change is made.What can WordPress do?
WordPress is an excellent website platform for a variety of websites. From blogging to e-commerce to business and portfolio websites, WordPress is a versatile CMS.
Here are just a few examples of the types of websites you can build with WordPress:Two ways to use WordPress
There are a couple of different ways to host your WordPress website:
WordPress.com is the hosted version. That means your website runs on the official WordPress servers. You can go there right now and create a website for free in just a few minutes.
However, there are a few limitations to WordPress.com. You won't have access to all of the thousands of themes that are available. Also, you won't be able to use WordPress plugins (these are mini-programs that add special features to your website).
There's also a small fee if you want to use your own domain name. If you decide you like WordPress and want to take full advantage of everything it has to offer you can easily move your site later.
WordPress.org is the self-hosted version. This is what you'll use if you want to run WordPress on your own web hosting account. When you use this version, you have complete control over the design and functionality of your website.Getting support for WordPress
Thanks to its huge open source community, there are plenty of places to get WordPress help when you need it.
Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com offer support forums and independent training websites (like WPFixs) also offer support to members.
There are also hundreds of WordPress books to guide you on your WordPress journey. For this very reason, WP receives a good share of features, bug fixes, regular updates and awesome support.
At the WordPress support forums, you can ask a single question and get more answers that you'll ever need.
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