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WordPress 101

An Introduction to WordPressBy Shanta R. Nathwani

+Some Statistics

As of August 19,2011:

WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. These stats apply to both WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites.

In July, WordPress.com blogs passed the50 million mark. At the time, WordPress revealed that each month, 287 million people account for 2.5 billion pageviews on WordPress.com blogs.

In his speech, Matt Mullenweg says that WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and has seen 200 million plugin downloads. WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade speed in the blogging platform’s history.

Retrieved from TechCrunch September 7, 2012

+.Com vs. .Org

Hosted on the WordPress servers

Gives an address like: tantienhime.wordpress.com, but can have your own domain ($)

Very little customization

Can be seen on the WordPress home page

No Plug-ins

Also known as “self-hosted”

Allows for customization of almost everything, including themes, plug-ins, permissions, etc.

Space is only limited by the hosting provider

Ability to upload video and audio files “out of the box”

WordPress.com WordPress.org

+Some Examples of My Own

WordPress.com:

http://tantienhime.wordpress.com

WordPress.org

http://malverncollegiate.com

http://roxannereads.com

+Who Is Using WordPress?

The National Post

TechCrunch

The Huffington Post

CNN Blogs

Mashable

Time Magazine (blog)

The Wall Street Journal

+Why Are They Using It?

Highly customizable

Allows for multiple users and multiple domains (including sub-domains)

Built in SEO, Analytics and framework

Easy and cheap to use

Millions of resources (themes, plugins and forums)

Open Source

+An Important Distinction

Dynamic

Tags

More for blogging portions and news

Static

No Tags

Used for Contact and About pages

Posts Pages

Posts vs. Pages

+Another Important Distinction

Helps to determine the structure of the website

Can be used to create menus much like pages

Describes the content

Use about 5-7 per post

Categories Tags

Categories vs. Tags