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I have been building blogs and websites for years, and am often asked what the best platform to start a blog is, and that’s undoubtedly WordPress. But for those who aren’t familiar with what WordPress is exactly, this series will give you the basis you need to get started with your blog.

  1. What Is WordPress (you are here)
  2. How To Get Started With WordPress
  3. How To Use The WordPress Dashboard
  4. How To Use WordPress Themes
  5. How To Use WordPress Plugins
  6. Understanding WordPress Site Security
  7. WordPress Blogs: It’s All About The Content
  8. How To Optimize WordPress For Speed
  9. How To Prepare Your Blog To Build Traffic From Search
  10. How To Prepare Your Blog To Build Traffic From Social

WordPress is an open-source content management system used around the globe to build websites and blogs. “Open source” means that the programming code is publicly available. Nothing is proprietary or hidden. WordPress is completely free to use.

It’s a Content Management System

In simplest terms, a website is a collection of content published on the World Wide Web. But just as a library has a system for shelving its assets — books, tapes, and videos — so patrons can easily find them, a content management system organizes digital assets.

According to Wikipedia: “A content management system (CMS) is a computer application that allows publishing, editing and modifying content, organizing, deleting as well as maintenance from a central interface. Such systems of content management provide procedures to manage workflow in a collaborative environment.”

WordPress provides an environment to plan, create, and publish content to the Web. It’s simple enough that an individual can use it, and it’s sophisticated enough to work for teams and large organizations.

“Content” can include text, images, audio, video, links, and more. Each image, audio clip, video file, etc., is a separate piece of content.

It’s a Website Builder

Through the magic of programming, WordPress takes the digital assets you provide and turns them into a website.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I built my first website, a web page wasn’t all that different from Microsoft Word documents. We used HTML code to give instructions to the browser to show headings, new paragraphs, italics or bold type, and other styling.

In those days, a web page was a single, defined entity. Sort of like a Word document that you might open or print. That document is stored in a folder or directory and accessed when you want, and pages were the same way. They could be moved, deleted, uploaded, edited, and viewed.

WordPress doesn’t work that way.

It still uses HTML to instruct the browser, but that’s about the only similarity. A “web page” in WordPress is not a page in the way you would normally think of it. Instead, it’s a collection of content assets, arranged to appear in a predetermined design format in the viewer’s browser window.

This is an important concept, so stay with me for a minute. Once you understand this, you’ll find it much easier to create the site you want with WordPress.

Think about a blog page for a minute. Typically, it shows a headline, an image, and a few lines from a blog post, followed by another headline, image, and a few lines, followed by another post and another. By default, they’re in reverse chronological order, with the newest one at the top.

Here’s an example, from the Blogging Brute blog.

Back in the day, to create a page like that, I would have typed each headline (with the necessary HTML code), added each image, typed those two or three lines of text, and added the link to another page where the reader could see the whole post. When I wanted to add a new excerpt, I would edit the page to add the new headline, image and text, and delete the oldest one from the bottom of the page.

Each of those excerpts would have linked to a separate page that included the entire post. And each of those pages would have been created the same way.

Today’s blog “page,” though, is created by programming. You create the post (text content), you add images to the media library (media content), you tell WordPress which image you want to use as the featured image and where in the article to place other images, and you’re done. WordPress puts them together, in the right order, on the blog “page.”

That same post can be displayed in many different places, but you only created it once.  The WordPress programming does the rest.

It’s the same with another common part of a web page, the sidebar. It’s made up of different content assets called widgets, arranged in the order you specify. WordPress automatically adds the widgets to the “page” when displaying it in someone’s browser.

So when you look at a web “page” in WordPress, you’re really seeing a collection of digital assets.

Why Use WordPress

There are lots of reasons to use WordPress. Here are just a few — it’s:

  • Free
  • Open source
  • Easy to customize
  • Easy to add or change content
  • Easy to get help
  • Scalable — as your business grows, your WordPress site can grow with it

Who Should Use WordPress

  • Bloggers, obviously
  • Solopreneurs
  • Small businesses
  • Medium-sized businesses
  • Big businesses

WordPress began as a blogging platform, but it has evolved into much more. You might be surprised to know some of the businesses that use WordPress today. They include organizations like:

And of course, with over 3 million WordPress websites — a number that is increasing every day — there are a lot more.

WordPress Basics for Bloggers Series

  1. What Is WordPress (you are here)
  2. How To Get Started With WordPress
  3. How To Use The WordPress Dashboard
  4. How To Use WordPress Themes
  5. How To Use WordPress Plugins
  6. Understanding WordPress Site Security
  7. WordPress Blogs: It’s All About The Content
  8. How To Optimize WordPress For Speed
  9. How To Prepare Your Blog To Build Traffic From Search
  10. How To Prepare Your Blog To Build Traffic From Social

Next Steps For New Bloggers

  1. Validate your blogging idea and create a plan using the Blogging Startup Planner.
  2. Follow the steps outlined in How To Start A Blog: The Ultimate Free Guide.
  3. Use the Ultimate Blogging Planner to plan your blog content and strategy for the coming year.
  4. Use the Blog Promotion Checklist to get maximum visibility to your blog posts each and every time.

DISCLOSURE: Some links in the article above, and throughout this site, may be affiliate links. While there’s no additional cost to you, purchases made via those links may earn me a commission. Only products and services which have been tried and tested are reviewed, and those reviews are always thorough and honest. If you benefited from my review and have a genuine interest in the linked product, your use of the affiliate link is appreciated and allows me to continue writing these kinds of helpful articles.

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