Content management systems and WordPress

Content management systems, or CMS, are tools that help people create websites without needing advanced technical skills. They’re like a set of building blocks that you can easily put together to make a website. 

With a CMS, you don’t have to write complex code because it provides a user-friendly way to add text, images, and videos to your site. It’s great for anyone who wants a website but doesn’t know how to code. A CMS allows you to focus on what you want to share on your website — your stories, products, or ideas — while it handles the technical stuff behind the scenes. It’s a helpful tool for making a great website without the technical hassle!

There are many different CMSs available such as Joomla or Drupal
which are both free, open-source CMS. But there is one name which stands out, as over 40% of all websites use it.

WordPress is an incredibly popular CMS which is very widely used in web development. Because it has such a large number of users, it has many different plug-ins and templates which have been developed by those users, making it one of the most versatile CMS.

Local or online hosting?

You can download WordPress to your own computer, and make a local website which you can use to practice, but which nobody else will be able to see. This is great when you’re just learning as it’s completely safe and secure.

Once you’re ready to make your first site which is online, you will need to get hosting and a domain name. Hosting provides you with some space on a web server, which stores your website and lets people go onto it. A domain name is the URL (uniform resource locator) which users type in to get to your website. Many services will provide you with both, but always look at a variety of services as prices can vary a lot. You should also make sure that your hosting provider supports WordPress – most do, but always check!

What can WordPress do?

You can make some really complex websites with WordPress – it’s particularly popular for shopping websites, and for things like recipe sites and blogs. It provides the basic template for the site, so all the pages will have the same layout and theme, and makes it very quick to add new pages. It’s very easy to set up shops with WordPress, making it quick to do things like set up payments and shopping baskets, which are quite hard to do when programming.

It can also provide searching, sorting and filtering, split search results into pages, and even do things like marketing using customer email addresses, and search engine optimisation by making it easy to test which keywords boost the website.

How do I learn?

Even though WordPress is good for beginners, there is still a bit of a learning curve. You will find that there are many free online resources which can help you to develop the skills you need, or show you how to set up your first site. There are lots of courses available online – you should start by looking at free courses on YouTube or course websites such as Coursera. WordPress also has a large community, including lots of small local meetups which can be a great way of meeting other developers and learning more, as well as networking.

In the next step you will learn about web applications and making web apps.

Optional exercise: Making a WordPress Site

If you want to try WordPress, you need to download and install it on your own computer, or on a web domain which you own. You can then use the dashboard to set up and add content, to add plugins, and to manage your website. You should only ever download WordPress from the official website: WordPress.