The World Wide Web is an ever-growing entity, with more and more individuals desiring to have their own piece of online real estate advertising their business, service or simply their thoughts. As a Web Designer it is important to recognise this, and utilise any tools that can help you to produce excellent web pages quickly and simply, web pages that your clients can maintain by themselves.

Enter WordPress!

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS); a system that allows a user to make changes to the content on the pages or posts of a website without needing to alter any HTML code. Although it is technically possible for anyone to put together their own simple WordPress website, many individuals will still look for a Web Designer to set things up for them so that they may have something more unique for their business which will help to strengthen the identity for a company or the brand of a particular product.

Although the completely free and open source WordPress was initially created as a platform for bloggers, the system has developed far beyond this humble beginning. Nowadays many powerful, attractive and highly functional web pages can be developed on WordPress, packed with these many benefits:

• Anyone can download WordPress for no cost whatsoever; this is a free framework that you can upload straight onto your website hosting to have this content management system up and running in no time at all. Many web hosting packages even include one-click installation programs that will install WordPress for you in literally just a couple of minutes. This installation usually also creates the necessary MySQL database to function with your WordPress website.

• After installing WordPress on a particular domain you can easily access the admin panel by visiting the address http://www.YourDomainHere.com/wp-admin. This admin panel is incredibly simple to understand and to use, with the ability to update pages and posts as easily as in a piece of word processing software.

• A lot of web designers around the globe take advantage of the WordPress system, and as such there is a useful and active community offering advice and suggestions for your own WordPress website.

• The look, feel and functionality of your WordPress website is governed by its theme; usually a combination of PHP, CSS and JavaScript files. There are thousands of themes either for free or a fee online that you can insert directly into your installation of WordPress. Many of these themes include a range of customisation options, from inserting your logo to altering the colour scheme to changing the layout of each individual page.

• Another great strength of WordPress is the vast multitude of plugins that can be added in to increase the functionality of your website. Want to incorporate a picture gallery or a survey? Want to improve your website’s Search Engine Optimisation or prevent spam comments on your blog? Plugins for all of these tasks and more are freely available for WordPress developers.

If you enjoyed reading the above, you may like to read more articles like this in our Articles For Web Designers category.