WordPress, at it’s most basic level, is web software used to create beautiful websites, blogs, or apps.
The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, which means it is always evolving and improving. There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. WordPress powers over 60 million websites, which makes it undeniably the most popular website platform in existence.
WordPress allows you (the website owner) to log in, and manage your own content such as text, images, fonts and colours, all without needing to know or learn a single line of code.
What You Can Use WordPress For
WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins and widgets and themes, WordPress is limited only by your (or our) imagination.
What is a plugin?
Plugins are simple, installable bits of software which extend and expand the functionality of WordPress. Some plugins are free and some are paid. You could say a plugin is an app for your WordPress website. Want to display the current weather of your city in the header of your website? There’s a plugin for that. Want to display a full width image slideshow with moving captions on your home page? There’s a plugin for that too.
What is a theme?
A WordPress theme provides some or all of the front end styling of your WordPress site.
Most WordPress themes provide:
- the overall design or style of your site
- font styling
- colors
- widget locations
- page layouts (or templates)
- styles for blog posts and blog archives
- additional stylistic details
Free vs Paid WordPress Themes
Just like WordPress plugins, you can choose from over a thousand free themes, or invest in premium, or paid themes. (We only use premium themes).
The advantages of premium themes are like those of premium plugins. Premium themes usually have a reliable code base and offer a much broader range of options for your website.