1.3 Why WordPress

For the purpose of this course, I'm going to start with WordPress already installed on my web server. Just a quick word about this set up, we're using wordpress.org, which is the open-source project that you can install on your own web server. While wordpress.com is a place that you can sign up and create a free blog that they'll host for you, you can also download the WordPress software and install it on your own server to build websites that can do just about anything. WordPress has a lot of advantages. Most importantly, you can't underestimate the community that exist around it. With WordPress, it's all about the ecosystem. When you need to add social share buttons to your post, for example, there are plugins for that that make it easy to enable with just a couple of clicks. Those plugins make it really easy to build a WordPress site without any real programming knowledge, drop in a plugin for what you need, and instantly you've built in the feature without having to know programming. WordPress powers a huge part of the web, but you might be mistaken in thinking that it's only a blogging platform. You can build out entire websites with it and not even blog on your site. In this course, we're going to build a static site for our small business with WordPress. We'll build out a number of pages for each of the needs that our business has. I'm not a programmer, but I've built a number of successful websites on top of WordPress. It was mostly thanks to combining plugins and pre-made themes and customizing them. When you install WordPress, there are really two key parts to the equation, you get the frontend of the site, which shows the blog post or the content that you build out for it. The way that this is styled is controlled by the theme. There's also the backend, the admin panel where you control the content that goes into the website. This admin panel is where you set up all of the settings, content, and more for your website. This Admin panel is where you control everything that appears on your website. That includes editing and building posts, building out static pages, controlling the users that can also contribute to the site, and much more. That Admin panel makes it easy to maintain a website, and I'm going to teach you how to use it in this course. When you build a site with WordPress, it does so much right out of the box. And it only gets better, as you add themes and plugins to do exactly what you want. Let's learn more about themes and what they control on your site.