What is WordPress?
WordPress is an example of a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is designed to make publishing websites easier, take away some of the more technical aspects and allow non technical people to create and make updates to websites. WordPress is the most popular CMS at the moment. It’s rise in popularity can be put down to the following factors:
- it is open-source (anyone can help to develop it)
- it is free to use
- it has a loyal user base and lots of support from the community if you are having trouble
- there are loads of free themes (to change the look of your site)
- there are loads of free plugins (to extend the functionality of your site)
The big advantages are:
- it allows you to create great looking websites (like this one!) relatively quickly and easily by using predesigned themes. In my experience a theme never looks quite how you want it to, so there is usually fair amount changes to be made
- if you choose a responsive theme, it takes care of making sure that your site is mobile-friendly
- it produces SEO friendly content, for example by tagging this post “WordPress”, I automatically get a new page created in my website with a heading and title of WordPress, which will appear somewhere in the search results when someone searches for “WordPress”
- it automatically populates menus for you
The major downsides are:
- because it is so popular it tends to be a target for hackers, so there is a risk of being hacked and a need to apply regular updates
- it is important to keep regular backups of your website (so you can recover if you you get hacked)
Should I use it for my website?
It depends on your site. WordPress is great for creating a wide variety of websites, but there may be cases where it isn’t appropriate. It may be considered overkill for a small site, and certainly should not be used if top security is a requirement.
I can help
If you are interested in creating a WordPress website, I can help. Please get in touch.