Many people who are seeking to create a website ask me what I recommend. Almost always, my recommendation is WordPress. WordPress started out as an open source blog software in 2003, however it has matured into a complete content management system. What’s a content management system? Quite simply, if the pages on your website are the content, it’s a system that allows you to easily manage, edit, create and delete pages.
Many websites are powered by WordPress… even if they aren’t a blog. In fact, it’s estimated that 1 in 4 new websites are powered by WordPress. Over 75 million websites depend on WordPress. WordPress can power almost any site!
Why does the popularity of WordPress matter to you? It means it’s a highly supported system. There is a plethora of information out there about WordPress. There are over 15,000 themes for WordPress, so the look and feel of your site can be customized infinitely. There are over 42,000 plugins for WordPress which expand and customize the functionality.
What’s the price tag for this amazing piece of incredibly popular software? Zip, zilch, nada! WordPress is totally free. It’s what they call “open source” software, which means it’s built by hundreds of community volunteers.
Why should I use WordPress? There are so many reasons, but probably the biggest reason is the ease of use. It’s very user friendly and has an intuitive user interface. Adding and editing pages, uploading photos and more can all be done without having to deal with all the dreaded acronyms like FTP, SSH, HTML, CSS, PHP or MySQL. You can control everything from any web browser with simple point and click interactions.
WordPress can also grow as your business grows. It’s extremely scalable and can support thousands of pages (or blog posts), and best of all, search engines LOVE WordPress sites. WordPress is written in a way to make it very friendly from search engines to be able to visit, and index your site… which is what most site owners want.
To get started using WordPress, you can download it for free at www.WordPress.org or if you prefer a little more hand-holding, signup for a WordPress Plan here: https://superwebhost.com/wp-hosting/
>> Joshua Pettit is Lead Developer and Project Manager at Sunrise Marketing. http://www.sunrise-marketing.com/
Hey Josh, great article! I just purchased a podcast template, so my first question is, do I run Wordrpess from cpanel or my PC? Thanks!
Hey Dean,
WordPress is installed in your hosting account. Here at SuperWebHost we would be happy to install WordPress for our clients (just put a ticket in and ask) and we even provide an auto-installer (just click on the Installatron link in your cPanel and choose WordPress) which walks you through an automated install process in just a few steps.
If you are new to WordPress keep an eye out for Josh’s post here on the SWH blog as he has more mosts about WP coming up.