Let’s say you are looking to make a website and you have absolutely no idea how to start. Let’s go ahead and take it a bit further and assume you have no knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, or MySQL databases. Just to put icing on the cake, let’s also assume you’ve never used FTP for anything in your life and you don’t really care to learn about any of these things if you can avoid them. You’re in luck, because it turns out you can make an awesome website without knowing anything about code! In fact, I won’t even mention any of these things for the rest of this article. If this sounds like something that appeals to you, WordPress might be your new favorite tool.

You might be surprised to learn that SiteMilk.com is built on WordPress. Yes, this website you’re currently surfing is actually a WordPress website. But what is WordPress you’re asking…and I still really haven’t given you a very clear answer. In layman’s terms, WordPress is a framework which will serve as the core of your website so that you don’t have to go reinventing the wheel. Installing WordPress is like getting a free car that has an engine, transmission, wheels, brakes, all its other important functional parts. It just needs a nice paint job to start cruising around the internet! It turns out, even the paint job it comes with isn’t all that bad.

I’m willing to bet you had no idea this site was built on WordPress when you first looked around. I built this site on WordPress for a few reasons, but the main reason is that WordPress is easy to set up and I wanted to get my website up quickly. I don’t like having to reinvent the wheel. As someone who has been doing web development for around 11 years, I will say that WordPress is one of the easiest and cheapest tools that can help you build an amazing looking website in about a week. Experienced users can probably set up a WordPress website in one or two nights depending on the complexity of the website. Truth be told, I can set up a basic WordPress website in about 10-20 minutes. On top of that, you can install and configure WordPress without knowing anything about traditional web development methods. Back in the day you had to know mark-up languages, a scripting language, a server-side language, and a database language in order to make a website. Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore. Let’s be honest, you probably don’t care all that much about how to talk to a database. You probably want your data to be secure and your website to be fast, but you’re willing to leave the details to individuals much more interested in this sort of thing.

If SiteMilk’s look and flow isn’t enough to sell you on WordPress, take a look at the WordPress themes available for around $35 at ThemeForest.net. These are templates you can set up after you install WordPress through cPanel. If you don’t know what cPanel is, don’t worry. cPanel is basically a control panel that just about every web host offers when you register a domain and host on their server. cPanel is going to help you install WordPress and manage your website so you don’t have to manually code anything! It doesn’t get much better than this. Web development has really come a long way. I’m not saying you won’t have to get into the code to do certain things when it comes to fully customizing your WordPress site, but I am saying if you pick the right theme and install WordPress through cPanel there’s a very good chance you’ll be bragging about your new website the very next day.

Now that we’ve covered the basics on why WordPress can help you, let’s cover some situations where WordPress usage would be best applied. I’ll venture that if you’re looking to make a basic company website, personal blog, family website, educational website, or any other website that simply needs to look good, look clean, function well, and be easy to manage, then WordPress might be for you. You certainly don’t have much to lose other than a night or two playing around with it. The only time I’d prefer a platform other than WordPress is if you are looking to sell more than 20 products on your website. We call this sort of website an e-commerce site, and in my opinion there are better tools for this than WordPress and these tools are beyond the scope of this particular post.

Hopefully this has helped shed some light on the mysterious WordPress you’ve been hearing so much about! I’ll be posting a WordPress install and setup walkthrough very soon so be sure to check back. In the meantime if you’re looking for cheap WordPress website hosting feel free to sign up for a Fat-Free SiteMilk Hosting Package. We offer free WordPress installations on any of our packages. Just e-mail milkman@sitemilk.com or put your request in your order comments when you place your order.

Cheers,
Milkman