Beginners Guide To WordPress

WordPress is a free open-source software that helps a user build a website or blog with ease. It is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world. There are a number of themes to choose from to customize your site to your needs, and plugins to give you even more functionality than the base package offers. Nutty About Hosting will host your website for you, eliminating the need to download any software to your computer.

First popularized by bloggers, WordPress has since grown in flexibility since implementing the 3.0 version. Custom menus, multi-site support (I’ll talk about this in a bit), better help menus, and a slick default theme are the highlights of 3.0. You don’t need to be a programmer to set up a website with WordPress. The easy to customize templates help with that. If you can use a web browser, you can build a website. What’s even more remarkable is the site is setup for navigation on any device. It’s already optimized for mobile, tablet, and PC use. While a native application (written for the device) might be faster, having a device independent website up in a snap is a great feature for businesses with a tight IT budget. For more experienced users, however, there’s the option to customize the code for most of the site.

Setting up the administration for the site is easy as well. You can select a password for the administrator, customize your site’s name, password, and hide or add your site to be listed on Google and other search engines. Each administration screen is presented in sections, the toolbar (and header), the main navigation, the work area, and the footer.

Plugins can be downloaded from the website and offer a lot of great functionality to extend your site. Some of the most popular are: photo galleries, stats, Facebook Integration, social media buttons to share on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Available also, is a plugin for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), one of the most important tools for any business owner. If you decide to use WordPress.com to host your website, most of these functionalities are included. Browse some of the plugins available here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/browse/popular/

Also new to version 3.0 is Multisite. Multisite allows a user to create a website of websites. This is advantageous for larger organizations and business. Many universities use Mulitsite successfully. They make a separate site for each department or athletic team. This approach can also help with SEO. Separating the parent and child into two unique domains forces the search engines to treat them as different sites. The parent-child link boosts search engine rankings.

This feature isn’t for everyone, however. Small businesses, personal projects, and blogs don’t need to use this functionality as the management of several different websites can become quite time consuming. If you want to see a working example, http://www.bbcamerica.com uses Multisite.

In summary, WordPress can be a fantastic tool for large and small business looking to develop easy-to-use, stable, and attractive sites quickly and affordably.

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