With learning the basics of WordPress, you will be able to start building your website and have your own online business or marketing campaigns up and running in hardly no time at all.
And, as your online business and marketing campaigns grow, WordPress will easily grow right along with it. And, Better Yet… WordPress is Completely 100% Free to Use!
So, Who Uses WordPress?
WordPress is used on millions of websites and blogging platforms worldwide and has no signs of slowing down.
From stay at home bloggers, to small business owners, to even Fortune 500 companies, WordPress is a force to be reckoned with and can easily power your own online business.
Here are just a few well known companies that use and trust WordPress to run their own websites and blogging platforms…
- Microsoft News Center
- The New York Times Company
- The Clorox Company
- Bloomberg Professional
- Time
- Reuters Blogs
- The Rolling Stones
- Mercedes-Benz
- TechCrunch
- Facebook Newsroom
- Sony Music
- The Walt Disney Company
Even The White House uses WordPress!
WordPress – A Clear Winner!
WordPress is by far one of the most popular and versatile content management systems (CMS) that you can use to store and manage all of your content and other important things on your website.
- You are in complete control and have full ownership of everything on your website… content on pages & blogs, media library (videos, music, podcasts, photos, images & PDF files) as well as everything else!
- It can be used to create a custom landing page, a beautiful looking website, or a soon to be popular blogging website.
- You can build anything from a niche website, to an authority website, to even an eCommerce website (online retail store).
- With WordPress, you have the power and flexibility to do it all!
Once you are inside the main console area of WordPress, you will have access to many things including:
- Dashboard
- Customization
- Media
- Widgets
- Links
- Pages and Posts (Blogs)
- Blog Comments
- Plugins
- Main (and Sub) Navigation Menus
- Settings
- Themes
- And So Much More!
Out of the box, WordPress is super sophisticated yet it’s also very user friendly to use. You really don’t need any technical knowledge to operate it, just a lot of common sense.
WordPress is intuitive by design. If you know how to type on a computer… you can easily start publishing content on the Internet using WordPress, whether it’s your first webpage or blog post to start building your own online business hassle free.
WordPress is an open source project, which means it’s constantly being maintained and upgraded by a professional community of “tech gurus” (volunteer programmers and developers) that are located around the world… all without ever charging you a single penny for using such an Awesome Platform!
Once you join a web hosting provider (to have your website appear live on the Internet), they should offer WordPress where you can install it for Free (one-click install).
Why pay someone else big money to create your own website?… when WordPress can easily handle it all for you… for FREE!
Plugins
To help you build your site with custom features and advanced functionality, WordPress has a whole bunch of free and paid add-on plugins (actually 1,000’s of them) that you can easily install and start using them immediately.
Here are just some of the more popular WordPress plugins that are available for you to use:
- Akismet
- Contact Form 7
- Google XML Sitemaps
- W3 Total Cache
- Yoast
- And, Many More!
You can also install plugins specifically created for social media to easily share your content with others who may be on different social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Themes
WordPress offers a huge variety of free and paid premium themes to choose from so you can start designing your website right away.
In the main console area of WordPress, just go to: Appearance Menu » Themes » Add New. From there, you will be able to select from thousands of WordPress themes. Once you install a theme, then go over to Customize (also under the Appearance Menu). Now, you are ready to start designing your website based on the features and capabilities of that theme.
Word of note about using WordPress themes that are free:
- Offer limited features and are designed for beginners in mind
- Harder to build more professional and custom looking websites
- Free Themes may not get updated frequently
- Coding behind free themes may become outdated to the new coding standards of WordPress
- No customer support is offered
However, if you really want to completely custom design your entire WordPress website easily and make it look like you had just spent $1,000’s to have it professionally done for you, you can buy a very affordable premium theme. This will save you a lot of time on the front-end to quickly start building your professional and custom looking website without all the hassles and headaches of learning complex coding in doing so.
In addition, with using a paid premium theme, it usually comes with outstanding customer service to help you with any questions that you might have along the way in building your professional and custom designed website.
Our top pick for an outstanding website designing theme is GeneratePress, which is super easy to use and works hand-and-glove with WordPress. And, they offer both a free and paid premium theme. On top of that, they pride themselves with having outstanding customer support service. To learn more about what GeneratePress can do for you, click on Building a Custom WordPress Website.
WordPress SEO
WordPress comes right out of the box as being SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly for building your website. You can incorporate many of the SEO best practices which will make the search engines (like Google) really happy. Some of the SEO best practices that you can do include using the following:
- Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
- Custom Permalink Structure
- Headline Tags (H1-H6)
- Internal and External Linking
- Anchor Text
- Alt Tags for Images
- Follow/NoFollow
- Redirects (301 & 302)
- XML Sitemaps
- Social Media Integration
These extremely popular SEO WordPress plugins are specifically designed to get your website Highly Optimized for SEO purposes:
- Yoast SEO – Improve Your SEO For Your WordPress Site
- W3 Total Cache – Easy Web Performance Optimization (WPO) Using Caching
- Google XML Sitemaps – Generates A Special XML Sitemap For Search Engines
Don’t Forget Your Free WordPress Mobile App
The WordPress Mobile App is perfect for writing new content (pages or blog posts) or for editing or updating existing content to your website… on the Go!
Got an important thought to quickly jot down… at the airport, park, or somewhere else that you are stuck without your computer? Then, this mobile app is for you. See how much you can get done with a little extra time on your hands.
Get your free WordPress Mobile App today!
But, Which WordPress To Use? (.Org or .Com)
There are two versions for WordPress on the Internet:
Essentially one comes with no restrictions or limitations (WordPress.org) while the other one comes with too many to deal with (WordPress.com) with respect to running your online business. For running your online business, you want no restrictions or limitations. In this regard, this website is always referring to WordPress.org for running your online business or marketing campaigns.
WordPress.org
WordPress is a free downloadable software that is self hosted which means you will need to get web hosting. Your web hosting provider will usually offer WordPress for free with just a simple one-click install. This is all completely normal for building your online business and is how the vast majority of those using WordPress to run their own online business choose to use WordPress.org.
With using the self hosted version of WordPress, you will have No Restrictions or Limitations for running your own online business. You will be in complete charge, control, and have complete ownership of everything in WordPress. The way it should be for running any type of business.
WordPress.com
More for the beginners or basic personal bloggers who want to set up a free account and have web hosting for free, but you will have to use their domain name, unless you pay extra for an upgraded account. An upgraded account will start to remove some of the restrictions and limitations depending on which plan you go with. Depending on the plan, you could have restrictions and limitations as to some of the following: domain name, storage space, customizing the site, themes, plugins, monetizing the site for selling products and services, removing the WordPress.com branding. They can even run their promotional Ads on your site without your permission!
Bottom Line: In choosing which WordPress to use for running your own prominent online business – Pick WordPress.org… The free software with no restrictions or limitations!
Finally
Building a full featured custom website with WordPress is now easier to do than ever before, even for the complete beginner! Start your online business today with one of the most powerful and ever popular content management systems (CMS) out there on the Internet… WordPress!