Your definitive guide to: WordPress

Most people who have some knowledge of websites and the building/management process will have heard of WordPress. WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS), so supports the creation, management, organising, publishing, editing and deletion of website content from one central dashboard. WordPress is one of the most popular open-source technology for building websites, read on to find out more about its key components.

There is a free version of WordPress that leaves you with a domain name akin to www.mybusiness.wordpress.org. However, we wouldn’t recommend this if you’re attempting to set up a professional-looking website for your business. You will be limited on the themes and plugins you can use, you don’t have your own domain name and you will be limited in your access to support and the ability to customise or tailor plugins and themes.

WordPress relies on themes and plugins to create the design and functionality of your website. And in this respect, WordPress can be one of the more flexible platforms to build your website on with the opportunities to create a website with an online shop, image gallery, blog, video collection, reviews, social media integration, e-newsletter integration. . . the list is pretty exhaustive. The plugins enable all of this, with different designs and functionality. WordPress also has a really simple, intuitive back-end system that can easily be used by novices and non-tech members of staff with relative ease.

As a widely-used platform, WordPress also has an impressive support network for both novices and developers. If the answer to your query doesn’t already exist with a tutorial or helpful video then the support forum has many active users who will be quick to help if needed. And in WordPress’ own words, their “Happiness Engineers are only a click away ” so you can get right to the people in the know (you need to be logged in to WordPress for this link to direct you).

WordPress is a great platform for blogs as it lets you easily categorise content through key word tagging. WordPress also supports Trackback and Pingback to allow you to track links back to your posts and articles. This is one of the reasons that it’s become one of the most popular blogging platforms, and with multiple SEO plugins, your blog can be a champion on Google more easily. In fact, the blog post you're reading right now has been brought to you by WordPress!

If you\’re interested in finding out more about WordPress or using WordPress for your website then let us know, it’s one of our favourite things to talk about: hello@webfwd.co.uk