An Introduction
If you looked at starting a blog or website, chances are you’ve heard of WordPress. While you may have heard of WordPress, you may not know what WordPress is, or why you might want to use it. In this tutorial series, I’m going to cover the very basics, all the way to expert level topics. With the upcoming release of WordPress 5.9 on January 25, I feel like now is a great time to write a deep dive. WordPress 5.9 includes a huge feature, known as full site editing. Full site editing enables anyone to edit the entire layout of their website.
My hope is that you’re empowered to build websites entirely with WordPress’s new full site editing capabilities. By the end of this series, you will have developed the knowledge to utilize full site editing to it’s full potential.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is what is known as a content management system, or CMS. Just know a CMS is generally just a nice interface to manage content. It takes the manual work out of writing your content in a specific format, and uploading it. WordPress originally started out in 2003 focused on blogging. However, over the years, WordPress has turned into a general-use CMS that site builders all over the world use for any type of website.
Why Choose WordPress?
If you want to take the extra steps out of managing the content you write, you should choose WordPress. WordPress is the most popular CMS on the market. In personal experience, I have found WordPress to be much easier to use than the next two most popular CMSs: Drupal and Joomla. There are reasons to not choose a CMS such as WordPress, and use something like a static site builder, but I will cover those in another series. All you need to know is that WordPress works great if you want an easy way to manage the content you write.
There is one statistic that I always recommend taking a look at, which is what the market share of WordPress is, as well as where it ranks among other CMSs. As of 2022, WordPress is used by 43% of websites, according to Kinsta. In the same statistic, WordPress also makes up 43% of the CMS market share.
In Conclusion
Now that you know what WordPress is and why you might use it, we will jump into how to download and install WordPress in the next part of this series.