I recently had the honor to speak on WordPress for Public Relations to the Chicago WordPress Meetup Group. While I was semi-prepared for a crowd with multiple levels of WordPress and PR experience, I realized the importance of explaining some of the fundamental basics of WordPress.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an opensoure content management system (CMS) that originally launched for running a blog. Basically, it’s a piece of free software that one can upload to a web host and use it to run a website. It gained popularity – to the tune of 13% percent of the top 1,000,000 website¹ – because:
- it’s free
- supported by an excellent community of users and
- for the most part, offers a simple user experience.
There are a lot of reasons why WordPress is so amazing but ultimately, it brings the power of advanced web publishing to the people. Prior to the advent of WordPress, someone who wished to create a website, or blog, without a budget or technical expertise, would rely on traditional blogging services like Blogger or Xanga. Today, with almost little to no startup costs, WordPress can be utilized to create a full-fledge website/blog. Most importantly, users can launch their site/blog on a private domain, with their own hosting account and further its creation with their own foresight. Being able to tweak the website’s front end – or theme – to one’s desire, is ultimately what has driven the popularity of this platform.
Over the last several years, WordPress has truly opened the doors for several niche blogs and news outlets. Including CountryMusicChicago.com, an online magazine/blog created by yours truly. WordPress helps Country Music Chicago disseminate information, in a timely manor, to its readers. Much like of a traditional news website.
In my upcoming posts, I will elaborate more on why WordPress is free and the tools needed, or recommended, to get started.
This post originally appeared on WPforPR.com.