Spend any copious amount of time on this site and you’ll see me talk about WordPress.  Spend any time in conversation with me, and WordPress will come up.  I have a WordPress sticker on my laptop and my Official WordPress iPhone Case is on its way to my doorstep as I type.

So, really, what is WordPress?  And why should you care about it?

This post is meant to be the first of a series dictating just how cool WordPress is, and why you should consider switching / converting your old, static HTML site over.

So, back to the question at hand… what is WordPress?

If you look at the WordPress.org site, here’s the official definition:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

It’s pretty cryptic, but the next sentence explains it in a nutshell:

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

So, how is it different from a standard website?

In a standard website (.html based), a developer/designer creates a template shell, saves each individual page as a separate file, and uploads the content.  When an item needs to be changed, it has to be changed on the individual file and re-uploaded.  If you’re a small business with a small web-budget, you don’t have resources to have someone change a single word every time you need one changed.

WordPress does things differently. Instead of storing the content in files, it stores the content in a database.  The database is either stored on a different part of the server, or sometimes on a different server altogether.  Whereas a static page contains both structure and content, the WordPress theme envelops and wraps the content in the theme files – meaning you can change, edit, delete, and add new content using one set of template files.

OK, it seems cool, but is it for me?

Do you:

• Have a small 3-5 page site that you want to have more control over?
• Do you have content that changes on a regular basis (events calendar, etc.)
• Do you want to add a blog to an existing site?

Then YES, absolutely WordPress is for you.

Over the next few posts I’m going to be talking about hosting, installation,