WordpressBen 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 27th 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

http://moodle.brightfuture.co.uk/course/view.php?id=59

Unit 1 - Employability Skills for IT Assignment Brief-1

https://managewp.com/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpress-usage