What is WordPress?

WordPress is a popular Content Management Systems(CMS) that allows web site administrator, from the secretary that answers the phone to the top level executive, to easily add and edit text, images and video on their Web site. A user name and password is required to login to the WordPress Dashboard, the top level administrator has the ability to make other users who wish to update content at various permission levels. WordPress falls into the classification of a blogging platform but many web developers simply use it as a base for building a entire web site. The blog aspect is usually saved for a news or press releases page, just a chronological list of news posts. WordPress also allows for the creation of additional pages of your web site with no HTML knowledge necessary.

This is great if you are adding a new service or area of expertise which you would like to have on the main top navigation and not buried within your site. You also have the ability to add sub pages or child pages to any top or parent page which allows you to divide your services or products into their own separate pages. With WordPress you can easily upload images through your browser and resize them, create thumbnails or entire galleries without any image editing software. All through your web browser which means you can access it literally anywhere you have an Internet connection.

There are 2 versions of WordPress, WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

The WordPress.org version is a downloadable application which you would upload and install on a web server that supports PHP and MySQL. WordPress.com does not require a sub domain or a hosting package but lacks several key features that the WordPress.org install allows. The main and most important feature is the ability to install custom WordPress themes, the front of the web site. WordPress.com blogs are also running off of the WordPress.com domain. For example, a WordPress.com web site or blog would have the address of http://blogname.wordpress.com
Wordpress also allows for installation of plugins, written by web developers to add a certain abilities that WordPress does not currently offer out of the box.

Popular plugins allow for online forms, social media links to allow users to quickly post your blog post to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites and pretty much anything you can think of that you would like your WordPress site to have. A simple Google search will usually provide instant results for the plugin you are looking for.

There are hundreds of not thousands of CMS’s currently available online, some community supported, some developed by a company and sold. I’ve tried quite a few of them and a few years ago decided to develop our sites on the WordPress content management system. It’s community supported and offered free to the public and even comes with dozens of free themes or templates. Where point2point comes in is we install it, configure it to maximum security, and then design a custom theme to accurately portray your company or organization’s image to the world.

Most aspects of a Web site can be edited through WordPress except for certain design aspects of the site which would require a Web developer to modify and then upload. Certain things like company logos in the header and other “design aspects” of the site are usually un-editable. Since WordPress is so dynamic, there is endless customization to make pretty much everything possible to manage but usually not cost effective or necessary.

It’s the bee’s knees.

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