what is wordpress?
You might have heard this word a lot, and may be it’s the first time you do.
But it is definitely worth knowing about, especially if you’re interested in owning a website.
Let’s consider this scenario:
You own a news website, and you want to keep adding news as they happen to your website.
It’s not practical to add content to your website by writing code using a special language called HTML (which is the base of webpages, or what is loaded in your browser. It is used to arrange text, pictures …etc. Think of it as the language that your browser speaks and what you see in your browser’s window is basically written in HTML).
So it’s not practical to write HTML code in an HTML file and upload it to the site every time you need to add content, or keep downloading and uploading HTML files every time you want to edit or delete content from your site.
So consider this different scenario:
What it you had a special page, that only you can use as a site owner, or you can assign special access for certain people to use it.
This special page, which we will call the ‘Control Panel’ or the ‘Dashboard’ enables you to add content directly by simply writing it in a Word processor like editor (like MS Word, or the way you write emails in gmail, hotmail … etc.) and then publishing it.
It also enables you to edit content, delete content, manage the appearance of your website, manage your website as a whole, without the need (or with a minimal need) for coding or following so many steps.
This is what CMS’s do!
CMS stands for Content Management System, actually the name explains itself; it’s a system that helps you build your website fast, customize it, add/edit/delete content on it, and many other features.
WordPress is the most popular content management system.
It helps you do the above mentioned and more.
To use WordPress, just install it on your web hosting company’s server and start customizing it (there are plenty of tutorials about how to do that, and how to use WordPress in general. We’ll do the setting up and build your website for free! – learn more).
Some famous WordPress terms
We’ll just explain a couple of terms related to WordPress that you might hear the most; ‘Theme’ and ‘Plugin’.
A theme: is related to how your website looks like. To change your website’s appearance, just install your desired theme and make it active. There are plenty of WordPress themes out there, with more added every day, some are paid and some are free, some have paid and free versions, but you’ll probably do just fine with a free theme if you are just starting out, or you don’t need special features.
You can of course preview a theme before even installing it, or make it active on your website.
A plugin: another essential WordPress term, it is related to the functionalities added to the website.
For example, you want to add the ‘social media sharing’ functionality to your website, so users can share your website, or parts from it, on social media. So you’ll need to add sharing buttons that will appear on different parts of your website. To do so, you need to install a plugin that does just that.
Like themes, there are so many plugins for WordPress, but only the relevant ones should be installed, installing more than you need can make your website slow.
There is of course a lot to say about WordPress, but we don’t want to get you overwhelmed. So we only gave you here a basic idea, you can learn more at your own pace.