In a world in which technology advances in the blink of an eye, WordPress really does make building websites easy — and free! How else can you get your content out to a potential audience of millions worldwide and spend exactly nothing? There may be no such thing as a free lunch in this world, but you can bet your bottom dollar that there are free websites and blogs. WordPress serves them all up in one nifty package.
The software’s free price tag, its ease of use, and the speed at which you can get your website up and running are great reasons to use WordPress to power your personal blog or business website. An even greater reason is the incredibly supportive and passionate WordPress community. In this chapter, I introduce you to the WordPress software so that you can begin to discover how effective it is as a tool for creating your website.
Discovering the Benefits of WordPress
I work with first-time website owners all the time — folks who are new to the idea of publishing content on the Internet. One of the questions I’m most frequently asked is “How can I run a website? I don’t even know how to code or create websites.”
Enter WordPress. You no longer need to worry about knowing the code because the WordPress software does the code part for you. When you log in to your website, you have to do only two simple things to publish your thoughts and ideas:
Write your content.
Click a button to publish your content.
That’s it!
WordPress offers the following competitive advantages as the most popular content management tool on the market:
Diverse options: Two versions of WordPress are available to suit nearly every type of website owner:
WordPress.com: A hosted turnkey solution; primarily used for blogging
WordPress.org: A self-hosted version to install on the web server of your choice; used for building blogs and websites
I go into detail about each of these versions later in this chapter, in the “Choosing a WordPress Platform” section.
Ease of use: WordPress setup is quick, and the software is easy to use.
Extensibility: WordPress is extremely extensible, meaning that you can easily obtain plugins and tools that let you customize it to suit your purposes.
Strong community of users: WordPress has a large and loyal members-helping-members community via public support forums, mailing lists, and websites geared to the use of WordPress.
The following sections fill in a few details about these features and point you to places in the book where you can find out more about them.
Getting set up the fast and easy way
WordPress is one of the only platforms that can brag about a five-minute installation — and stand behind it! Both versions of WordPress take you approximately the same amount of time to sign up.
Mind you, five minutes is an approximate installation time. It doesn’t include the time required to obtain domain registration and web-hosting services or to set up the options in the Dashboard. (You can find information on web-hosting services in Chapter 3.)
When you complete the installation, however, the world of WordPress awaits you. The Dashboard is well organized and easy on the eyes. Everything is clear and logical, making it easy for even a first-time user to see where to go to manage settings and options.
The WordPress software surely has enough meat on it to keep the most experienced developer busy and happy. At the same time, however, it’s friendly enough to make a novice user giddy about how easy it is to get started. Each time you use WordPress, you can find out something exciting and new.
Extending WordPress’s capabilities
I’ve found that the most exciting and fun part of running a WordPress website is exploring the flexibility of the software. Hundreds of plugins and themes (designs) are available to let you create a website that functions the way you need it to.
If you think of your website as a vacuum cleaner, plugins are the attachments. The attachments don’t function alone. When you add them to your vacuum cleaner, however, you add to the functionality of your vacuum, possibly improving its performance.
All WordPress websites are pretty much the same at their core, so by using plugins, you can truly individualize your website by providing additional features and tools that benefit you and your readers. When you come upon a WordPress website that has some really different and cool functions, 98 percent of the time, you can include that function on your own website by using a WordPress plugin. If you don’t know what plugin that website is using, try dropping the website owner an email or leave a comment. WordPress website owners usually are eager to share the great tools they discover.
Most plugins are available at no charge. You can find out more about WordPress plugins and where to get them in Chapter 7. Chapter 15 lists my top ten choices for popular WordPress plugins available for download.
In addition to using plugins, you can embellish your WordPress site with templates and themes. WordPress comes with a very nice default theme to get you started. Figure 1-1 shows the default Twenty Seventeen theme, created by the team from WordPress, which is displayed by default after you install and set up your site for the first time.
FIGURE 1-1: Start a new WordPress website with a theme.
The theme’s default style is minimal, with a handy application built into the preferences that allows you to change the colors and insert an image to use as a header image. (You can find more about tweaking WordPress themes in Chapters 9 through 12.)
The Twenty Seventeen theme (refer to Figure 1-1) includes all the basic elements that you need when starting a new WordPress site. You can extend your WordPress site in a hundred ways with plugins and themes released by members of the WordPress community, but this default theme is a nice place to start.
Using some of the thousands of plugins and themes available, you can truly manage many kinds of content on your website. WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore (although it does still excel at it!). Although WordPress became well known as a blogging platform, you can use it to power diverse and dynamic websites that allow you to do things like develop an e-commerce site (selling products online), create a members-only site where your content is curated only for those who have registered and become members of your site, or create a large corporate business site like the one you can see in the Microsoft News Center at https://news.microsoft.com.
Using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) frees you from running only a blog on the platform. (See Chapter 12 for more about the technique of designing for WordPress as a CMS.)
Taking part in the community
Allow me to introduce you to the fiercely loyal folks who make up the user base, better known as the vast WordPress community. This band of merry ladies and gentlemen comes from all around the globe, from California to Cairo, Florida to Florence, and all points in between and beyond.
In March 2005, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress proudly proclaimed that the number of WordPress downloads had reached 900,000 — an amazing landmark in the history of the software. But the real excitement occurred in August 2006, when WordPress logged more than 1 million downloads, and in 2007, when the software had more than 3 million downloads. The number of WordPress downloads has broken the ceiling since 2007 (more than 35 million downloads by the beginning of 2017), and the number of WordPress users has climbed to tens of millions and is growing daily. WordPress is easily the most popular CMS available on the web today. It currently powers approximately 25 to 30 percent of all the websites you see on the Internet in 2017 — roughly one of every four sites you encounter on the World Wide Web.
Don’t let the sheer volume of users fool you: WordPress also has bragging rights to the most helpful community on the web. You can find users helping other users in the support forums at https://wordpress.org/support. You can also find users contributing to the very helpful WordPress Codex (a collection of how-to documents) at http://codex.wordpress.org. Finally, across the Internet, you can find multiple websites about WordPress itself, with users sharing their experiences and war stories in the hope of helping the next person who comes along.
You can subscribe to various mailing lists, too. These lists offer you the opportunity to become involved in various aspects of the WordPress community as well as in the ongoing development of the software.
Joining the WordPress community is easy: Simply start your own website by using one of the two WordPress software options. If you’re already publishing on a different platform, such as Blogger or Movable Type, WordPress enables you to easily migrate your current data from that platform to a new WordPress setup. (See Chapter 14 for information about migrating your existing website to WordPress.)
Choosing a WordPress Platform
One of the realities of running a website today is choosing among the veritable feast of software platforms to find the one that performs the way you need. You want to be sure that the platform you choose has all the options you’re looking for. WordPress is unique in that it offers two versions of its software, each designed to meet various needs:
The self-installed and self-hosted version available at https://wordpress.org. (This book focuses on this version.)
Every WordPress website setup has certain features available, whether you’re using the self-hosted software from WordPress.org or the hosted version at WordPress.com. These features include (but aren’t limited to)
Quick and easy installation and setup
Full-featured publishing capability, letting you publish content to the web through an easy-to-use web-based interface
Topical archiving of your posts, using categories
Monthly archiving of your posts, with the ability to provide a listing of those archives for easy navigation through your site
Comment and trackback tools
Automatic spam protection through Akismet
Built-in gallery integration for photos and images
Media Manager for video and audio files
Great community support
Unlimited number of static pages, letting you step out of the blog box and into the sphere of running a fully functional website
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) capability (see Chapter 2) with RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom support
Tools for importing content from other blogging systems, such as Blogger, Movable Type, and LiveJournal
WordPress.com is a free service. If downloading, installing, and using software on a web server sound like Greek to you — and like things you’d rather avoid — the WordPress folks provide a solution for you at WordPress.com.
WordPress.com is a hosted solution, which means that it has no software requirement, no downloads, and no installation or server configurations. Everything’s done for you on the back end, behind the scenes. You don’t even have to worry about how the process happens; it happens quickly, and before you know it, you’re making your first post using a WordPress.com solution.
WordPress.com has some limitations, though. You can’t install plugins or custom themes, for example, and you can’t customize the base code files. Neither are you able to sell advertising or monetize your site at all on WordPress.com unless you pay the $299 annual fee. Also, WordPress.com displays advertisements on your posts and pages to users who aren’t logged in to the WordPress.com network (https://en.support.wordpress.com/no-ads). But even with its limitations, WordPress.com is an excellent starting point if you’re brand-new to blogging and a little intimidated by the configuration requirements of the self-installed WordPress.org software.
If you don’t want or need to create a full website for your business or service and just want to create an online diary of sorts, you typically use WordPress.com, because it excels at allowing you to get a simple site up and running quickly. As I mention previously, however, if you want to use the thousands of plugins and themes available for WordPress — or if you want to customize your own theme for your website — you are limited to only a few themes on the WordPress.com-hosted service, and you are not able to install your own plugins on the service either.
The good news is this: If you ever outgrow your WordPress.com-hosted site and want to make a move to the self-hosted WordPress.org software, you can. You can even take all the content from your WordPress.com-hosted site with you and easily import it into your new setup with the WordPress.org software.
Self-hosting with WordPress.org
The self-installed version from WordPress.org that I cover in this book requires you to download the software from the WordPress website and install it on a web server. Unless you own your own web server, you need to lease one — or lease space on one.
Using a web server typically is referred to as web hosting, and unless you know someone who knows someone, hosting generally isn’t free. That being said, web hosting doesn’t cost a whole lot, either. You can usually obtain a good web-hosting service for anywhere from $5 to $20 per month, depending on your needs. (Chapter 3 gives you the important details you need to know about obtaining a web host.)
You need to make sure, however, that any web host you choose to work with has the required software installed on the web server. Currently, the minimum software recommendations for WordPress include
PHP version 7 or later
MySQL version 5.6 or later
Some web hosting providers haven’t yet upgraded to the latest version of PHP. If your web-hosting provider has older PHP or MySQL versions, the WordPress software will work with PHP 5.2.4 or later and MySQL 5.0. These older versions, however, are considered to be end of life, which means discontinued in the software world. Older versions of PHP and MySQL still work but are no longer supported and, therefore, are susceptible to security vulnerabilities.
After you have WordPress installed on your web server (see the installation instructions in Chapter 3), you can start using it to publish to your heart’s content. With the WordPress software, you can install several plugins that extend the functionality of the platform, as I describe in Chapter 7.
You also have full control of the core files and code that WordPress is built on. So if you have a knack for PHP and knowledge of MySQL, you can work within the code to create your own themes and plugins that you think would be good for you and your website. Find information about PHP and MySQL in Chapter 2.
You don’t need design ability to make your website look great. Members of the WordPress community have created more than 3,000 WordPress themes, and you can download them for free and install them on your WordPress site. (See Chapter 8.) Additionally, if you’re creatively inclined, like to create designs on your own, and know CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you’ll be glad to know that you have full access to the template system within WordPress and can create your own custom themes. (See Part 4.)
The self-hosted WordPress.org software lets you run an unlimited number of websites on one installation of its software platform, on one domain. When you configure the Network options within WordPress to enable a multisite interface, you become administrator of a network of sites. All the options remain the same, but with the Network options configured, you can have additional websites and domains, as well as allow registered users of your website to host their own websites within your network. You can find out more about the WordPress Multisite feature in Chapter 13.
Sites that use the WordPress Network options include the following:
BBC America (www.bbcamerica.com): The BBC America site contains all the shows and movies that the TV network offers. It’s a huge WordPress Multisite network, with each show having an individual site.
Microsoft Windows (https://blogs.windows.com): Niche-specific blog networks use WordPress to manage the content they publish through various channels on their website about the Windows software — in multiple languages.
Seeing how WordPress can benefit you
Mind you, five minutes is an approximate installation time. It doesn’t include the time required to obtain domain registration and web-hosting services or to set up the options in the Dashboard. (You can find information on web-hosting services in 
If you think of your website as a vacuum cleaner, plugins are the attachments. The attachments don’t function alone. When you add them to your vacuum cleaner, however, you add to the functionality of your vacuum, possibly improving its performance.
Some web hosting providers haven’t yet upgraded to the latest version of PHP. If your web-hosting provider has older PHP or MySQL versions, the WordPress software will work with PHP 5.2.4 or later and MySQL 5.0. These older versions, however, are considered to be end of life, which means discontinued in the software world. Older versions of PHP and MySQL still work but are no longer supported and, therefore, are susceptible to security vulnerabilities.