Acodemy - Wordpress: Learn Wordpress In A DAY! : The Ultimate Crash Course to Learning the Basics of Wordpress In No Time

Objective: This chapter gives you a brief overview of WordPress and what it can do to help you create a website.

If youre new to websites in general but you want to create a blog or site, youve probably seen a product called WordPress thrown around. WordPress is well known in the webmaster world, because its easy to use, you can create a blog within minutes, and best of all its free. In this eBook well cover everything you need to know about WordPress and how it helps you create a brand and a presence on the Internet.

Why Use WordPress

If youre looking at a WordPress solution, youve probably already decided to build a website. WordPress is used by professionals, enthusiasts, and hobbyists. Its also a good solution for people who have never had a website and dont know where to start. Thats what makes WordPress so valuable for website owners. You dont need any type of technology knowledge to get started. You can even build a website for free on the wordpress.com domain. Your site becomes a subdomain of the main wordpress.com domain, so you just need to write without the worries about hosting and maintenance.

WordPress is also very versatile, so you can use it for several different types of sites. It was originally made for bloggers, so its well designed for blogging content. After its popularity evolved, several developers created ecommerce plugins. WooCommerce is probably the most commonly known ecommerce solution for WordPress.

Content continues to be one of the most important ranking signal for search engines, so many companies use WordPress for content management solutions. You dont need to be an expert in any blogging platforms to implement WordPress, and its compatible with alternative platforms such as Windows servers and Microsoft SQL Server. Youll need to do some additional configurations to get it to work, but WordPress is globally available for most platforms and server environments.

The first benefit of WordPress is the ease of use. If youve never used it before, it might be a bit intimidating, but once you work with the platform youll find that its one of the easiest content management tools to work with. You dont need to keep track of posts, pages, or even plugins. The WordPress dashboard shows you a list of published and draft posts, so you can easily organize your website content. The WordPress dashboard couldnt be more intuitive.

You can manage your content from anywhere in the world. Since the WordPress dashboard is included in the hosted application, you can open your dashboard from any browser as long as you have access to the Internet and your website.

Even experienced site owners dont need any HTML or FTP knowledge to work with WordPress. You dont need to upload any files or edit any HTML. You just need to install WordPress and start writing. No technical skill is required to get started.

Well cover SEO and search engine visibility, but another benefit of using WordPress is that the code is clean and it indexes well in search engines. Most webmasters are concerned with Google, and WordPress sites are easily able to rank and index in the search engine. There are also plenty of plugins and themes that help improve your SEO strategies and help engage users with the right layout.

WordPress doesnt require you to have any maintenance or patch skills. You just need to log in to your dashboard and update any plugins or even WordPress itself with just one click of the mouse. Again, you dont need any technical skill to maintain your site. You just need to add a few plugins, pick a theme, and then start writing. Its really that simple.

If you want to learn web development, WordPress is a great platform. If you dont, thats alright too. The point is that WordPress is completely customizable, so you dont need to stick with the same theme as other webmasters. You can hire a developer to customize a theme and your layout, or you can get into the code yourself and start with WordPress customizations and coding. Youll need a background in PHP coding, HTML and CSS. All three of these languages are easy to learn, so you can get started with WordPress development with little experience and a little practice with your own site.

Several other blogging benefits are already packaged with the WordPress installation. You already have RSS feeds installed, a comments filter called Askimet that filters spam, the right theme gives you an advertising panel where you can include ads for monetization, and most WordPress themes are responsive for mobile traffic. All of these benefits are included with either a theme you download directly from the WordPress plugin store or with the blog installation. This means you dont need to take time to develop or install these features yourself, which saves you time and effort when starting a website.

Plugins are one of the best benefits of WordPress. You dont need to add extensions to your site or find a developer to create additions. Thousands of plugins are available for you to download for free. Every plugin from SEO, content formatting, image creation, layouts, and any other number of features you need for your blog are available on the WordPress Codex site. There are also numerous premium plugin sites if you cant find the right one at the Codex site.

You might be a small site owner now, but you could have a successful high-volume site in the future. You need scalability to manage site growth, and WordPress will never hold you back from growing your business. Some large corporations use WordPress to manage their content, so youre in good company when you work with WordPress instead of using a custom solution. As a matter of fact, WordPress is one of the leading content management tools on the market.

Once your business grows, you can add users to your WordPress dashboard to gain more contributors. WordPress uses a tiered access model where you can have writers, editors, and administrators. You can have a team of contributors who work on managing your site, so you can manage other parts of your business. Some site owners contract content managers who find the writers, develop topics, and then have them edited before posting. They even create a schedule for your content, which is beneficial especially during the holidays or important events. For large sites, it can take hours from the owners time to properly manage content, and these content management help reduce the overhead of finding topics and ensuring that nothing but quality is posted to the site.