Introduction
These days, the number of small and medium-sized businesses is increasing. and because we are in a digital era, switching from or between offline business to online business is crucial to stay competitive in the market, which leads those businesses to require some solutions to manage their online presence such as selling online and providing services. The establishment of those solutions must be as quick as possible because time is money in the business language, so here came the CMS or Content Management System which it stands for a computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content, and from the most used CMS we find WordPress.
What is WordPress?
WordPress simply is a open-source CMS built using PHP and it's used widely and known among business owners who care about their online presence.
WordPress advantages
from things that they made WordPress well known, we mention:
- Its costs are cheap (all you need is a hosting plan and a domain name)
- It's extendable according to your business
- Its community is big and grows every day
- Because its community is big, there are plenty of agencies and freelancers who can carry applying your business requirements
WordPress disadvantages
with this freedom that WordPress gives, there are some inconvenient that you need to keep in mind:
- You take care of your website health such as keeping plugins up to date, using the appropriate plugins, and so on...
- There is no prior support, you need to hire a specialist or take it for yourself
Getting Started with WordPress
1. WordPress Installation
To get started working, first of all, you need to install Wordpress Zip from Wordpress.org and place it in the htdocs if you are using XAMPP or www if you are using WAMP or MAMP, this way if you want to test WordPress locally but if you want to go online directly, often you're going to use a hosting, for instance, Namecheap or Goddady, the majority of them use Softaculous it's a commercial script library that automates the installation of commercial and open source web applications in your website hosting.
2. After Installation
After the installation, here comes the start of modifying WordPress according to your business idea, but first, you must know what are the main components that WordPress has. so basically WordPress is composed of two main components that you will deal with often, themes and plugins, these two are the backbone of your WordPress, themes are the visual part of your website and you can switch between different themes or install, modify, and uninstall them, plugins are like third-party integrations that extend exists functionalities or add new functionalities to your website
3. WordPress by Default
WordPress by default looks like a news website, you have a section of posts and pages, you can add categories, and you can edit the header and footer to coordinate with your obligations
4. The Magic Part
WordPress offers a Marketplace where you can add plugins and themes, for instance, you can add Divi to create a good user experience and high-standing webpages using drag and drop, or if you want to build an E-Commerce website, here WooCommerce will tackle all the modifications needed, one thing will last you is the adjust the looks of your website.
there are plenty of plugins for the most of use cases and we can't mention them all here.
Conclusion
WordPress was founded in 2003 and since the day of its creation it has evolved every day according to business requirements, there is not only WordPress when we talk about CMSs, you can google CMS and you can find a bunch of open-source CMSs each one has its particularity