What is WordPress?
WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org) is a powerful open source content management system (CMS) and blogging engine. WordPress is arguably the most popular web publishing platform on the planet; it powers ChirpUp.com and millions of other websites.
Open Source
WordPress is open source software. This means that you can use it with no licensing costs. WordPress has a healthy developer community which also means that you get frequent new features and improvements (still with no licensing costs!).
Content Management
WordPress started as simply a blogging engine, but quickly matured into a full-featured content management system that is prefect for running many many types of websites. WordPress ships with controls to let non-technical users edit website content without knowing a lick of HTML, PHP or any kind of coding. Once your site is implemented, this means that you don’t have to call a web developer or hire someone when you want to change the content on your “About Us” or “Products” pages!
Extensible
WordPress is built to be extensible with custom themes and plugins. Custom themes allow you to dramatically change the look and feel of your site without changing your site’s content. Custom plugins allow you to add powerful features to your site, from custom contact forms to Twitter integration to showing your favorite photos on your site. WordPress’s thriving community provides thousands of free and low cost pre-made themes and plugins that you can start using today or customize to your liking.
And Yes, Blogging
You can publish blog posts with the same ease that you edit your site’s static content.
Don’t think you want to blog? Think you’re too cool to blog? Think you’re not cool enough to blog?
Well, you should blog. Blog with articles in your area of expertise. Blog with important news and updates from your company. Because here’s a little secret … GOOGLE LOVES BLOGS! Your site and it’s updates will be “found” by Google quickly if it’s based around a great blogging engine like WordPress (not to mention WordPress’s excellent built-in search engine optimization features).
Upcoming Tips
As great as WordPress is, we’d love to save you from a bunch of the common hiccups that people have when creating and editing content and managing a WordPress-based website. So we are going to be publishing a series of tips to help you get the most out of WordPress.
First up will be an article to help you format pages and posts (including embedded images) while avoiding a few of the commonly encountered quirks. So stay tuned …
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Andy Sernovitz
CopyBlogger
Gary Vaynerchuk
ProBlogger
May 15th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Just gettng started on WordPress so this helps out! Thanks! Best, Katrina
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Thanks… very pleased to hear you will begin a series of tips. I just started my WordPress blog about a month ago–feel like I’m 75% there, and always looking to make it better. -Steve
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Perfect timing! Ready to begin a complete site relaunch – we’ve decided upon WordPress. Can use all the help I can get.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I LOVE wordpress… it started off as just a fun side blog for me, but it quickly escalated into something more after I discovered how powerful its features were.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:00 am
I love WP too! I am actually building a frame on another existing site we have to support a WP blog. Much easier than html, php etc.
February 24th, 2010 at 10:41 am
WordPress has a very professional layout but Blogger is catching up too. If you have paid service, WordPress is a better blogging platform. The free version tends to be a little lag when the traffic gets heavy. Blogger is run by google and it seems to be adding a lot of other useful tools. I hope WordPress will adopt some of google’s strategies as it does value add to both the blog owners and the blog hosters.
August 13th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Looking forward to reading the tips! Thanks for posting