What is WordPress?

This site is designed to bring to you the best methods and tips to help you run and optimize your WordPress Blog and Websites. I will also be featuring a number of great tools that we find in our travels here, that we know will help you really get your blog and online business humming.

I setup and optimize WordPress Blogs and Websites for clients all around the world.

WordPress is a great platform because it is so easy to use, it is FREE and many of the add-ons (plug-ins) are free too. It makes is so simple for someone who is not particularly ‘web savvy’ or technical in nature to use WordPress to get their message out.

Another reason I think WordPress is such a great platform is that the Search Engines appear to love it. Couple that with some awesome plug-ins and we’re finding that our blog posts are being indexed generally within 24 hours and with the right (legal, Search Engine friendly) strategy I can be on Page 1 or 2 in a week or so… With a real dedicated focus, that can be bought down to days.

So please enjoy your visit here on the site, leave comments on my articles and participate in the discussion, tell your friends about me and enjoy the resources I share here with you.

So, What is WordPress and Why Use WordPress?

According to the Guru’s, WordPress is ‘preferred’ by the search engines. WordPress is a fantastic platform – it allows you to blog; with the right setup and assistance, you can can create a dynamically created website and, it is incredibly versatile. Once it is set up, it is so simple to manage that even a child can do it. But the thing that I like best about WordPress is that it is free.

You can easily load it onto your own hosting platform and literally be blogging in minutes. The number of add on modules (called plugins) is astounding. Plugins can do everything from automatically block SPAM comments from your site, make email contact forms a snap, intergrate a simple fully functional shopping cart or create a secure membership site. Some plugins may have a charge to use them, however, there are many fantastic free plugins available.

This site is a WordPress site and has many useful plugins installed.

The next great thing about WordPress is that you can change the “look and feel” of your site by changing the Theme. A Theme is a template for how your Pages and Posts are displayed. The Theme can be set up to have your Pages display as a single column for example and your Posts display 3 columns like the page you are viewing now.

So what is the difference between and Page and a Post? I am glad you asked…

The webpage you are reading is a Posts page. A Post is like an article and the main Posts page is like a magazine with multiple articles , generally displayed with the most recent post at the top. With Theme customization you can if you like have a specific Post display at the to as a Featured Article.

A Page on the other hand is a webpage that has a specific focus or use. It may be a Contact Us page, a Sales page, a Online Store catalog or even a Lead Capture page. Pages generally have “Static” content which means that it does not change. This of course does not mean it can’t be changed. If you click on the About link at the top left of the page you will see a single column Page.

As far as getting noticed in the Search Engines, Google loves new content.

With WordPress it is a dream.

You can set up your WordPress site with static pages do do all the things you need, be it just a information site, a sales site or a membership site. Then you put a blog on the site to provide Google with all that spicy new content that will have those lovely “Google Bots” crawling all over your site, often within minutes of making a new post. “Google Bots” are one of the keys to get listed high up in the page rankings.

So if you are getting the run around from your current web developer and want to take control of your web presence, need to sell that great product you have developed, or just want to get your own blog happening – WordPress, it’s for you.

Why You Should Use WordPress…

1. Incredibly easy to use

Despite its power, the back end user interface of WordPress is incredibly clean and easy to understand. Because it began as a system focused on blogging it needed to be easy to use, not just to web developers but for anyone that cared to try it out. This intuitive back end has been what has propelled the popularity of WordPress since the beginning. As I write this the current version of WordPress is WordPress 4.8 running Maryanne – GLS theme.

If you want to do something, the menu is going to be easy to find and make sense when you find it. On top of that, the admin can be customised by professional developers to meet your needs if required!

Need to organise events? Want to start a movie database? Cataloging types of amazon frog? No problem, it can be set up.

2. Even Easier to maintain

Can you click a button? Then you can keep your WordPress site up to date. It’s all automated so as a soon as a new version is available, you can update your site immediately.

All of the code output from WordPress is W3C standards compliant. This ensures complete compatibility across all modern browsers but also “future proofing”, so that it is easily extendible with new technologies as they are developed.

3. Infinitely extensible

Lots of platforms have plugins and extensions, but WordPress beats them all. From the amazingly easy to use plugin directory where you can extend the functionality in a matter of a couple of clicks, to the sheer number of people, (individuals up to big development agencies) making incredible plugins.

You can add galleries, sliders, forums, shopping carts and more. All of this while the core framework stays the same and can be updated without a hitch.

WordPress themes, the files that are loaded into the core and make what is commonly regarded as the “website template”, can be built or customized to do pretty much anything imaginable.

4. Great SEO performance, which is why Google loves WordPress

Google is constantly raising the bar in terms of what level of quality and relevance are rewarded by better search engine rankings, so it’s good to do whatever you can to improve your site’s search engine performance.

Due to the previous two points and many more, WordPress sites tend to do very well in Google search rankings. Even Matt Cutts of Google has said that WordPress is “a great choice” for improving your site’s SEO. If you’re site isn’t currently running on WordPress, it’s a safe bet it would be ranking better if it was.

5. Security

What would the point in all of this be if WordPress wasn’t secure? By default, WordPress is a very secure system, with various methods in place to protect against attacks. Its ease of updating makes this even stronger. There are also many useful security plugins available.