WordPress – A Wizard in the world of Blogging and Website designing!

by: Dckap

WordPress is a very popular blogging and content management system (CMS) tool. It is possibly one of the most well known and respected tools with over 4 million* websites using WordPress!

WordPress is an open source project which started in the year 2003, as a blogging tool.

Users are given an intuitive online interface to type, tag with keywords and upload their blogs or articles. The core idea is to help the user by taking over all the effort needed to present the information online, allowing him/her to concentrate on the content of his blog. Users can customize the theme or in other words, the web layout, background colors, font etc to better suit his content or give a more classy and unique look for his blog.

Once the blog is published on a website, there are other features provided by wordpress developer: Typically, when people read articles or blogs, they like to leave their comments. The interface to leave comments also allows authors to manage the comments posted.

Sometimes, authors would like to link to or comment on other blogs that are related to the same topic; these are done by what are called pingbacks and trackbacks. This way, the readers are made aware of the author’s comments on other blogs in one single page. The other feature that is very useful is Permalink or Pretty url, where users can specify a human readable and intuitive weblink name instead of machine generated links with numbers and special characters.

As WordPress became one of the default choices for blogging globally, subsequent version releases also came to be used as a CMS tool. The administrative panel provided could be used to customize the web layout around the content. The most important feature being a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor giving the user an idea of how the webpage would actually look in browser window.

The user can select if the home page will be static or a live one , for eg. with posts or testimonials updated as they are uploaded to a particular section of the website.

Individual customized Page Templates can also be applied to different pages of the website. Thus, user could choose some pages to not have the same header and footer as the rest. The user also has options to include widgets as sidebars that are dynamic and change as the page changes. By turning off some features that are blog specific, and customizing other features, users can easily build a truly dynamic website with WordPress!