WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. WordPress initially started out as a blogging platform but more and more it’s used to create websites. I’ve been using WordPress for close to 10 years now. It is my preferred software for creating sites. As a developer, it gives me the freedom to build anything I want. And it’s free it’s open-source and which means it’s managed and built and trusted throughout the web.
Watch this video to learn more about WordPress and why you should use it to power your website.
Who uses WordPress?
Around 40 percent of the web uses WordPress. More than 60 million people use it, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online such as Forbes, NewsCorp, Time Inc, LinkedIn and Facebook Blog as well as the White House.
Why do they use WordPress?
More than 60 million users use WordPress to power their sites. The reason they do that is infinite customisability. It is SEO friendly out of the box. You can create responsive mobile sites with it easily (particularly if you pair it with a very good theme like GeneratePress. WordPress is highly performant again some of these sites that I mentioned are massive and they need to be quite performant and load fast. You can even manage things by using the mobile app to edit or publish content. It is very secure. You can manage your content which includes rich media – embed YouTube or Vimeo videos easily. WordPress is also thoroughly accessible.
Another good feature with WordPress is with its longevity… It has been around since 2003. With longevity comes the number of plugins that are available (close to 55000 plugins). Plugins extend WordPress from a web publishing and blogging platform into a full fledger Content Management System (CMS). For example, you can build an ecommerce platform using a plugin like WooCommerce or build a community site using BuddyPress. Being open source, the WordPress community is what makes it as good as it is.
My journey with WordPress
I started using WordPress in 2007 to power my personal blog – I needed a space to share pictures with my family and friends. Once I used it I was hooked and I moved from Blogger to WordPress immediately and started to tinker with themes. I have been using WordPress for a quite long time and love it since you can theme it and make it look the way you want.
At VJ Design, these are some of the types of sites I have built using WordPress:
- Online shop
- Community Portal
- Local Business
- Journal for scientist
- Restaurant site
- Sports Club
- Dentist/Medical
- Social Media Integrated Site (powered by Facebook Blog)
- Online Portfolio
- Musicians Site with podcasts
- Stock Photography Site
- And many many more…
My own site is powered by WordPress.
In this short course we’re going to cover off quite a WordPress in quite a lot of detail using a local site that set up on my computer. Without further ado, let’s dig into WordPress…
