What's WordPress? Will it be hard to manage my site?
WordPress is the world's best-loved content management system. What's a content management system? It's software that allows you to edit and update your own site, without needing to know any code.
What can you do?
Tons of stuff. You can create, arrange and delete the pages of your site. You can edit your content, add photos, audio, video. You can write a blog, and then join a discussion with your readers in the comments section – which means you can start to build a community around your business.
Is it hard?
WordPress is incredibly easy to use – that's one of the reasons it's so popular. People all over the world, of all ages and all levels of experience with computers, use it to run their own websites and blogs. If you can write an email, or use Word, then you'll have no trouble with WordPress.
WordPress is set up on your webspace, so you don't need to download anything to your computer to make it work. You edit your site via a hidden, password-protected area of your website.
I've worked with a lot of content management systems in the past, but once I started working with WordPress, it was love at first log-in. And now we're exclusive. Well, I'm exclusive – WordPress shares its love with anyone that asks, the floozy.
Show me
Rightio. Here's one of the videos from the Phew! members site – this one shows you how to put links in your text. It's just a sample, but it should give you a rough idea of what it's like to work with WordPress.
http://www.vimeo.com/7012275Some other benefits
WordPress is completely search-engine friendly. If you"ll excuse me getting technical for a second, it writes valid code, according to web standards – which means it's more accessible, both to human users and to search engines.
Because WordPress is so popular, there's a huge community of users and developers out there. So there's lots of support – WordPress have their own support forum.
And there are tons of great plugins you can add to make your site do clever things – your site comes with several that I've picked for being especially handy, but if you want your site to do extra-fancy stuff the odds are there's a plugin somewhere that will do it.
Another great benefit of WordPress is that a designer can give your site a new look without having to interfere with the content at all. No need to move copy from one site to another – all the content stays where it is, it just gets a facelift.
And if the day ever comes when you want to change your design, there are loads of really great designers who work with WordPress and can give your site a new look. (Including me, of course! And as a website package customer you get a discount on any extra work you hire me to do on your site.)
Where next?