What is WordPress: Build up Your Site with World’s Best CMS
What is WordPress?
WordPress, WordPress Site, WordPress Blog, WordPress.com are the most buzzing word in the world of Blogging and Website building.
Many people are interested to handle a thing, rather than know what it is. Same is the case about WordPress. Many WordPress users are simply able to use WordPress but actually are not aware of what WordPress is.
We’ve prepared this inquisitive guide of ‘What is WordPress‘ for all the WordPress beginners to keep them stay ahead.
Without proper knowledge of WordPress, A WordPress user cannot dare to handle with or talk about the advanced know-how with full confidence.
So, is it wise to take care of branches without paying concentration on the root first?
WordPress: Historic relation with Website, CMS and Blogging platform
In easy word, WordPress is a website building tool, a CMS (Content Management System). Broadly, it is a website, blog and app building tool. Why tool? Why tool is required to build a website? What is CMS? Let’s explore the answers.
The history of website is not so old. It was just in 1989 when Berners-Lee invented WWW and formulated the idea of http, HTML, Server and Browser. This was the greatest invention in the history of Internet. Through this invention, mankind entered the world of data transmission technology in form of webpage or website by using web language like HTML and others.
We know, as a web language, we use html, CSS, JS etc. to design static page and Java, PHP, ASP.NET etc. for programming to create a dynamic webpage. As webpage started with the introduction of html, only static webpage was possible to create with html. And the first publicly available document created by html was ‘HTML Tags‘ by Berners-Lee in 1991.
Then in need of styling static page, CSS was introduced by Håkon Wium Lie which was released by W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] in 1996. In the mean time, as Server-side scripting language Java (1995) and PHP (1994) evolved. Through this invention paved the way to creating both static and dynamic webpage. As a matter of fact, since then Website age and culture got accelerated in the history of Internet.
Then how WordPress entered this historic scenario?
In this stage of our presentation comes the idea of CMS.
Website building technology was out of reach of common people. Building website was the sole business of web developer, Designer and programmer. Clearly speaking, you couldn’t expect to create a webpage or website without having expertise in different web language which is actually skill earning fact needing life-term efforts.
In this backdrop, a system was built up in order that even non-techy people can build up website without coding or any knowledge of web language. This is CMS.
This CMS technology simply involves creating, editing and publishing contents in GUI (Graphical User Interface) mode which lets any user create webpage and work in it by using Visual Interface commonly known as WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) without writing or touching any html or other codes. In WYSIWYG environment, a webmaster writes exactly what visitors see in front end.
But broadly speaking, CMS is much more than public-oriented blog publishing tool. Don’t get confused. CMS is also used to manage application, document and contents personal computer. But here we’re talking about web-based CMS platform that actually evolved originally as a Blogging platform to provide opportunity to common people to build blog-site of their own. Gradually CMS turned into powerful tool to create any kind of website.
For a complete understanding of CMS, follow our CMS tutorial linked below-
During those early years, some CMS’s cropped up as blogging platform. Among them which contributed first to bring the blogging in mainstream is Blogger. Blogger was developed by Pyra Labs in 1999 but it was bought by Google in 2003. Blogger is an influential blogging tool still today.
Among the most influential blogging platforms, WordPress came into being as a simple blogging tool in 2003. WordPress gradually emerged as the full CMS in a few years. WordPress started a revolution in the world of blogging as a popular CMS and gradually developed itself as a most powerful tool to create not only blog but any kind of website.
WordPress: What? Who? When? Why?
Literally speaking, CMS is a tool, a software and more definitely combination of codes that collectively build up structure of a program. So is the WordPress.
WordPress is a free and open-source CMS basically written in PHP scripting language and MySQL database management system. WordPress is a great software structure nothing other than thousands of PHP and sql code files inside many folders. Anybody can download and use WordPress structure files from wordrpess.org free of cost.
With the release of first version in May, 2003, WordPress started its tour as a simple blogging system [See, Essentials of WordPress Versions]. Over time, WordPress came out as a full CMS getting enriched with thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. WordPress is licensed under GPL (General Public License).
Due to availability of numerous themes and plugins and structural flexibility, WordPress can be modified into any kinds of websites the world ever experienced which has ranked WordPress as the best CMS. Currently over 35% of the total websites around the world are using WordPress structure. And WordPress has an estimated 63% of the market shares of all the websites that use CMS. Tremendous! no?
A common question is: Who created or developed WordPress?
Simple answer is: no individual or organization. Actually WordPress was developed by a number of contributors. Among the core contributors, some are Matt Mullenweg, Mike Little, Ryan Boren and Peter Westwood.
Afterwards, an organization named Automattic, whose president was Matt Mullenweg, came into being. At present wordpress.com which is a free hosted wordpress blogging platform, is run by Automattic. In this context, there is also another organization named wordpress.org which is engaged in managing, updating and distributing WordPress Project.
You can use all-free WordPress.com blogging platform to create your own WordPress Blog. But it has huge limitations. Again you can download WordPress project from WordPress.org and create a self-controlled WordPress blog or site. But for this, you have to purchase your own domain and hosting. [See, details on Domain and Hosting]
Remember, WordPress, Automattic, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are not the same entity. Don’t get confused. As a WordPress user, you must be clarified with each term. See our tutorial in this regard-
Why you should build your website with WordPress
We mentioned earlier that 35% of the total websites around the globe use WordPress. What about other CMS’s? Let’s look at a Report (a comparison chart) of global CMS usage surveyed by W3Techs (World Wide Web Technology Surveys) in 2020-
Obviously, we notice that second place is occupied by Joomla and Joomla user website is 2.4% which is far far below the figure with WordPress.
What does this survey disclose? It says WordPress is super-fast in the race of Content management system. WordPress is unbeaten, unparalleled and second-to-none in this event.
Now question, what made WordPress reach to that height leaving all others behind?
There are specific, technological, logical and non-technical reasons behind this immense popularity of this site-building-platform over others. Here are some focused reasons among many-
- WordPress Dashboard is a standard one. Its functionality is easy to understand and use
- Flexibility of structure that made WordPress possible to adapt with different themes, plugins, widgets and tools.
- There are thousands of WordPress themes, plugins and widgets which are easily available to users most of which are free.
- There are thousands of supportive resources for WordPress around Internet which are easily available free of cost.
- Compared to other CMS’s, WordPress is cost-effective. Due to occupying a huge market, WordPress has a vast themes and plugins development community. For that reason, even Paid theme and plugin are also cheaper.
- By using proper theme and plugin, WordPress can be turned into any kind of website including e-commerce, business site, directory site or even image or video sharing site.
- For multiple features and functionalities, Any kind of WordPress site is easy to manage.
- WordPress has multi-user, multi-language capability.
- WordPress is SEO-friendly as it automatically solves many SEO issues.
- WordPress structure is mobile-friendly.
Hope, if you’ve gone through this article with absorbed mind, you could get a transparent understanding of ‘What is WordPress‘ and discovered in you the logical reasons why WordPress should be your no. 1 choose for blogging as well as to build any website.
Are you stopped, halted or thinking something. Cast a comment right now. Any of your comment, opinion or evaluation will be highly appreciated.
