What is WP?

What’s WordPress?

What’s WordPress, your wondering? If you use the internet frequently, the chances are that you have visited a WordPress website. It’s estimated that there are nearly 1 billion websites; of that, over 800 million websites are WordPress. But for all of the attention that it gets. What exactly is WordPress? Who created it? When was it made? Why should you use it for your next website project? This article will cover WordPress and the advantages and disadvantages of web development for small businesses.

WordPress is Free

A free content management system for people to create websites.  For those unaware, a content management system, or a CMS for short, is a program that allows its users to generate, manage, and store content.  With WordPress, you aren’t required to know HTML beforehand, so you can create these complex designs with your site that would’ve taken months to set up otherwise if you lacked experience with web creation.

What’s WordPress – Dashboard – screenshot

 All the information you need to design a website is featured in an easy-to-understand, easily accessible format.  You can create posts, look at comments, and decide the appearance of your website.  Without a program like this, these things can be very complicated to set up or highly tedious if you’re planning to create a site alone.

WordPress Themes

You can pick the theme that you want the website to be in advance.  You can choose the theme based on your site’s focus, whether education, business, health, or other things.  There are three tiers of payment for WordPress that you can choose.  If you choose the free plan, you get 150 megabytes of space for the site.  If you choose the premium plan at $8.25 a month, you get 13 gigabytes (or 13,000 megabytes) of space, your site address, custom design, and Video press, a fast, easy-to-use video player that allows you to put videos on your site.  Finally, there’s the business plan for $24.92 a month. This plan provides for all things in the premium plan and unlimited space, premium-only web themes, and Google Analytics to track and report the traffic to your site.

Domain Name

There is also an additional fee if you want your website’s domain.  If you already have a domain you’ve purchased that you want to link to your WordPress site, its cost is nominal.

WordPress.org

This may seem fine and good to you if you want WordPress to be simple, but what if you don’t want a theme and want to use WordPress to create something unique?  Luckily, you still have that option.  With WordPress (different from WordPress), users have much more of an uphill climb but ultimately a lot more freedom.  With this program, you have to install the site onto your computer, update the design regularly, be responsible for keeping your website safe from spam, and constantly fix every problem when it arises.  This may seem challenging, but it rewards deeply if you’re looking for an independent website.  On WordPress.org, you can put whatever ads you want on whatever theme you want, there is an unlimited amount of storage space, and the site can’t be turned off if someone thinks your content goes against the terms of service.  Depending on whatever site you want, you have some options.

What’s WordPress & Who Created WordPress?

WordPress technically came to fruition on May 27th, 2003, but the program was around before this. In early 2001, Michel Valdrighi created a blogging platform called B2/Catalog, a more primitive program that was mildly successful.  When Valdrighi had to step down from the project for personal matters, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little stepped in to lead the team.  In May 2003, they presented the first version of WordPress (WordPress 0.71).  Their improvements to B2/Cafelog included the ability to disable comments and mark the status of a post (whether or not the post was ready to put on the site). You could state that the blogging aspects of WordPress launched social media society.

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little

As they updated the program, WordPress development became more and more complex.  In 2004, WordPress 1.0 allowed people to use permalinks to make the sites easier to look for on search engines. WordPress 2.0 contained better editing and faster image uploading. WordPress 3.0 allowed for more themes, better accessibility on mobile devices, and Twitter integration, among other things.  We’re on WordPress 4.5, which was released on April 12^th, 2016.  This WordPress update has more formatting shortcuts and inline linking, which allows you to link objects from other websites.  As a fun side note, every update to WordPress has been named after a famous jazz musician. WordPress 1.0 was called Davis after Miles Davis, and WordPress 4.5 was called Coleman after Ornette Coleman.

Other Important Elements of WordPress

The other fascinating, essential element of WordPress is that it is an open-source community; it isn’t owned or controlled by a single organization. If you get involved with WordPress, it can be straightforward to work with the community. WordPress is the work of tens of thousands worldwide, collaborating to improve this program. So while WordPress may have started as this small thing that only served a limited number of people, it advanced into a massive program with many workers serving endless users.

Another complaint by novice designers on WordPress has surrounded the challenge of creating a unique theme for your website.  If you want a website design different from the themes you choose from, you are out of luck, or you aren’t working with a website designer/developer.

Security

Security can also be an issue. While WordPress does somewhat have a security system, it wasn’t the strongest in 2014, when a malware campaign affected the website of over 100,000 users. In stating this, many website choices are available regarding locking down and securing WordPress platforms. The best way to secure a WordPress site would be to hire a web developer or someone with a strong foundation in website security and development. Plugins and keeping the website up to date can help protect websites from malicious attacks.

WordPress Plugin Complaints

WordPress has also received complaints like any CMS (Content Management System). For example, having too many or incompatible plugins can result in WordPress problems. You can mix and match different plugins and hope for the best, but we at Visualwebz know precisely which plugins are reliable and keep website problems at bay! Our WordPress web design process ensures that only functional plugins are installed and websites are maintained with little or no issues.

Many people who criticize WordPress quickly mention that they still love it despite their criticisms. But beyond these understandable complaints, WordPress is one of the most widely praised programs on the web. It’s big amongst website developers because it has flexibility for users and developers. For example, plugins that have made WordPress SEO and email marketing easy. Also, as Seattle WordPress developers and marketers, we help improve website content, drive traffic, and monitor visitors and web page rankings.

Lots of Themes are available.

Suppose you’re an expert web designer who wants to create a more detailed style for their site or head of a more significant business and needs a more elaborate website. In that case, there are options for you to create a more independent, experimental site. If you want a website to present your recipes but don’t know anything about web design, WordPress has themes that make it easy to build a site. You can create a free website or pay more and make a more extensive website.  And if you genuinely want to, you can even become a part of the WordPress community and collaborate to strengthen the program.

WordPress is exceptionally diverse, and it’s built to satisfy a broad group of people and businesses that range in preference and experience, from small business websites to more giant corporations such as BBC.com. They constantly update to reach the demands of all of these people.

Finally, What’s WordPress in a few words – A platform that many businesses are adopting!  Its consistent reinvention has allowed it to remain relevant close by for many years!