Build a Website with WordPress

If you are looking to build a professional easy to manage website then you may want to consider using WordPress.

WordPress offers many advantages when compared to the traditional such as:

• Hundreds of free professional templates
• Templates are easily customised
• Content and Layout are completely separated
• Easy to manage
• Content creation and management done using a web browser
• Look and feel easy to change.
• Easy to add extra functionality like voting, contact forms, sitemaps using plugins.
• Uses PHP and MYSQL which are supported on almost all web hosts.
• etc... and it's free

There are however also disadvantages.

1. WordPress is being constantly developed and so you will be required to upgrade from time to time.
2. You will need to ensure future upgrades don't affect plugins/and or that plugins are updated along with WordPress.

Upgrading is becoming easier and it will probably be done by your hosting provider in the future so I don't consider this to be a a major problem.

What is WordPress

 WordPress is open source Content management software that is normally used as a blogging platform. However recent changes have made it easy to configure it to look like a standard website.

Although WordPress uses PHP and a MySQL database to store the web pages no knowledge of either is required to write web pages for WordPress.

The advantage of using it are that it makes building and modifying a website very easy as compared with standard building techniques. In addition no expensive web editing tools like Dreamweaver or FrontPage are required.

This is important as once the site is up and running the site owner can add/modify pages without requiring expensive web editing software and, of course, the knowledge to use it.

The video below will give you a quick overview on WordPress and why I recommend you consider it for your website platform.

Building versus Design

Because WordPress comes with ready made templates and you simply need to select one to use you don't need to do any web design. This leaves you free to concentrate on building your site by creating content.

What You will Need

You don't need any web editing software like Dreamweaver all you need is a web host that supports PHP and MYSQL (almost all do). The ones I use to host my WordPress sites are:

• One and one -UK
• Blue Host - USA based

WordPress Course for Beginners

To help you get started I've put together an introductory WordPress course  that takes you through the basics.

Web www.build-your-website.co.uk

• Wordpress Installation
• How to Build a Wedding Website- includes case study using Wordpress