In 2003, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created WordPress as a fork of b2. It was a small piece of code that basically enhanced the typography of everyday web writing. While it was an inauspicious start, no one could have predicted where WordPress would be today.
Since that fateful day ten years ago, it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. There are millions of WordPress sites online and tens of millions of people visit WordPress sites daily. Almost 25% of all new websites are powered by WordPress!
WordPress.com provides the WordPress platform PLUS hosting. It currently hosts over 60 million websites. WordPress.org allows people to download WordPress and use their own hosting. There has been over 25 million downloads of the latest version.
It allows anyone to easily run a blog or website without coding knowledge. If you can use a word processor like MS Word, then you can use WordPress. Once WordPress is installed, you can log into the “dashboard”. The dashboard contains everything you need to build your site. You can add posts, pages, menus and much more to your website.
The overall look of your site is controlled by “Themes”. There are over a thousand free themes to choose from (and many more paid options), simply changing your theme can instantly change the entire style of your site.
Many themes have a sidebar area. You can place “Widgets” in the sidebar to customize the feel of your site. Popular widgets include; Menus, Archives, Tag Cloud and Calendar. You can also download different widgets that add all kinds of functionality.
To further tweak your WordPress website you can use plugins. Plugins are add-ons for your site, and there are thousands to choose from. Some plugins will help with your search engine visibility, others will show you real time traffic stats on your site. In fact, pretty much any function you can think of, there is a plugin to add it to your site.
WordPress is a wonderful choice for anyone who is interested in creating and running their own blog or website. Themes and plugins will let you accomplish almost anything you need too do, plus will handle the styling of your site. All you need is your own unique perspective, a little time and the drive to learn and master the web’s leading CMS platform.
If you have a WordPress site and want some help with it, check out the WordPress Inner Circle Academy!
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