What is WordPress?

This video is part of a series in progress.

To start off this course, let me answer a sim­ple ques­tion: what is WordPress?

Word­Press is an open source appli­ca­tion that was orig­i­nally designed to cre­ate blogs but now is used to build almost any web­site you can think of.

Using Word­Press, you can design any­thing from a sim­ple blog to an advanced web­site. There are 2 options, either using WordPress.com — which is a cloud hosted ser­vice — or you can install Word­Press on your own server and host it, which one to choose and why we will cover in later sections.

Word­Press was cre­ated Matt Mul­len­weg. On his blog you can read about what he is doing.  Matt’s blog is a stan­dard blog that out­puts a lot of con­tent, and you can read it, you can click around if you want to, and it also has pages that you can go to that have more information.

How­ever Word­Press doesn’t have to be just a blog; it can be pretty much any­thing you want. A lot of mag­a­zines use Word­Press because it’s an easy way of orga­niz­ing content, and you can also style it and make it look like pretty much what­ever you want. The Huff­in­g­ton Post is a good example. It’s a mag­a­zine, but it has kind of a blog struc­ture and a lot of advanced fea­tures, like social media fea­tures such as Face­book like and rec­om­mend buttons. It has advertising. It has lots of nav­i­ga­tional tools, and it’s pretty easy to read. There are also other sites that have no blog like fea­tures at all, such as eCom­merces and some busi­ness port­fo­lio sites.

As you progress through this course, we will be build­ing a site for the fic­tional com­pany Joe Blogs Plumbing. This is a self-hosted site, and it has a lot of inter­est­ing features.

Not only is it easy to build con­tent, but more impor­tantly, man­ag­ing that con­tent is very easy through the Word­Press dash­board.
The Word­Press dash­board is some­thing you will find both on WordPress.com and also on your self-hosted sites.

If you want to just set up a basic web site and you have no idea how to do any type of web design or web devel­op­ment, you can set up a Word­Press web site and never have to worry about the code.

Word­Press ships with a full Admin­is­tra­tion panel that appears inside your browser. So all you have to do is acti­vate Word­Press, set it up, and then you can man­age all your con­tent, write new posts, new pages, man­age pho­tos and videos, all from within this Admin panel, through your browser.

That means you don’t have to con­stantly upload and down­load files and man­age the HTML and CSS code; you sim­ply work in this very easy to under­stand panel. This is the true strength of Word­Press: easy usabil­ity for everyone.

Any­one can set up a Word­Press site and any­one can make it work to their advantage.