Wordpress Ben Mulpeter

What is wordpress?  Wordpress is a free Content management system (CMS)  It allows free tools to help design your website and free hosting for it  It’s open source which means the source code for wordpress is freely available.  It has a back end called a dashboard which is where you can modify your webpage and what the visitor to your page would see on the front end

History of wordpress  It was initially released on the 27 th May 2003  It was founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little  It was released under the GNU GPLv2 which meant it was open source and free  Since it’s release it has gone on to archive massive success and is widely used for modern websites all around the world  Over it’s lifetime it’s been updated and refined and is now on version 4.2  It has also received new features and become more advanced over it’s lifetime

First version of wordpress

Current version of wordpress (4.2)

Features of wordpress  Simplicity – wordpress is extremely simple to use and to set up  Flexible – wordpress can be used to create a range of websites  Multilingual – It is available in over 70 different languages which means that the more people form around the world can make wordpress sites and also view wordpress sites  Easy publishing – The interface for creating new posts and pages is really intuitive and simple to use  Themes and plug-ins – Wordpress has a massive library of themes to change the appearance of your site easily and plug-ins to extend it’s functionality  Community – Because it is open source and is so popular there is a massive community of people out there using wordpress

Wordpress statistics  Wordpress is used by more than 23% of the top 10 million websites on the web as of January 2015  There are 74.6 million websites worldwide that are powered by wordpress  22% of new registered US domains run on wordpress  Wordpress only employs 229 people  On average there are 6 new wordpress posts every second from all across the globe  There are over 29,000 wordpress plugins and that’s increasing daily  Wordpress runs 4.5%of the entire internet

Who uses wordpress?  BBC America  Sony music  MTV news  eBay  Xerox  Yahoo  Tech crunch  Sweden.se  Toyota  LinkedIn  Flickr  Samsung Here are some examples of large companies using wordpress

Why you should use wordpress?  It’s free - To host your website and to use their tools to design it doesn’t cost you anything  There are tones of plug-ins – There are loads of plug-ins that help to extend the functionality of your website  Loads of themes – Like plug ins there are loads of themes available for wordpress that let you pick how you want your site to look  It’s simple – As far as creating your own website goes it’s almost as simple as it gets  Help - if you ever get stuck there is a online manual on how to use wordpress at wordpress.org along with loads of other help across the web.

Benefits to using wordpress  Wordpress is free unless you want to buy premium themes for your website  You can buy premium themes that will cost you money because they are designed by outside company‘s  Its good if you have none or limited technical knowledge about the web because it’s easy to create and publish stuff to your site  Plug ins help Search engine optimisation (SEO) which means people searching in google or bing will have a better chance of finding your site if it’s relevant to what they are looking for  Wordpress works on mobile devices to view your site and also to edit and contribute to it  It also has been around for 12 years so has had time to become more sophisticated as a platform  It works well with social media and has lots of social plug ins

Drawbacks to using wordpress  If a security flaw is discovered in wordpress then your website could be hacked into.  Out of the box it isn’t very good at SEO so you have to install plug ins to make your site more SEO friendly  While the content on your site is protected by copyright the ideas and concept of your site isn’t so anyone can copy it  Updates to wordpress can break your site especially if you have a heavily customised theme  Plug-ins can have their own security variabilities and might not be kept as up to date as wordpress  Wordpress can be slow at times  It can be hard to make a website look original because everyone if using similar themes

Recommendations  Despite these negatives I would still recommend people to use wordpress  Make use of the thousands of plug ins  Change your theme to something more suited to your site  Take advantage of the wordpress community  Install a SEO plug in  Customise your site  Keep an eye out for security flaws  Keep you version of wordpress up to date along with all plug-ins  Install an analytics plug in to view and track the visitors to your site

Bibliography  p?id=59  Unit 1 - Employability Skills for IT Assignment Brief-1  about-wordpress-usage