The first thing I wanted to talk about here is WordPress. Because the name is going to come up a few times talking about other related stuff, so it’s worth explaining. WordPress’ own website describes it as a blog tool and publishing platform. Fundamentally, that means that it makes putting a website together easier.
More writing, less fussing
When you’re writing webpages from scratch, there’s a lot of fussing you can do with how things look. WordPress handles all of that for you, stopping you from seeing if maybe things would look better if the font was just a teensy bit bigger again. Which is great, because that means you’re forced to focus on the important stuff: writing the damned content. (Dealing with the fine details of formatting HTML is kind of like sorting your socks at exam time – at the point where writing content gets difficult, suddenly it seems like the most important thing in the world.)
So WordPress lets you focus on the job you should be doing, not the technology involved. Which is part of why we use it here ourselves. Even if you can understand and deal with the fiddly parts of HTML or CSS or Javascript, it’s not getting the job done. Plus, that kind of work is often time consuming and frustrating to get just right. So why not take advantage of someone having sorted it out for you?
So what sorts of things does WordPress do for you?
Not the only show in town
WordPress is by no means the only tool around that does the job it does. There are other popular options to help with writing content for webpages like Drupal and Joomla, and a number of popular platforms exist for hosting blogs (Typepad and blogger.com come to mind) and there’s a number of options out there for running your own blog as well.
I’m not going to tell you that WordPress is the best solution, and frankly you should be wary of evangelists. While there’s definitely better and worse software, it’s all fundamentally tools. People pushing one solution too strongly tend to have their own agenda, or are too deeply in love with the technology, rather than getting stuff done.
So why WordPress? Because it hits a sweet spot between functionality and ease of use. It’s pretty straightforward to manage a combined website and blog, and the two of those together are a great combination (not unlike peanut butter and chocolate, or Abbott and Costello) that Catherine may well explain the virtue of at some point. There’s a great range of themes and plugins for WordPress, raning from free solutions through to very powerful and polished commercial solutions. It’s a flexible, one-size-fits-most piece of software that lets you focus on whatever it is you’re running your website for, without getting bogged down in the process of doing it.
Now, because WordPress is software, it needs a little care and attention over time. Next up, I’ll be talking about basic care and feeding of a WordPress installation, and some great additions to WordPress you can use.