If you’re wondering what WordPress is or what all the fuss is about, here’s an outline explaining why it is such a wonderful tool for website owners and designers.

WordPress started out as a blogging platform but it has fast become a hugely popular CMS – that is, a content management system, or in layman’s terms, a website that the owner can log into and update without any special technical knowledge.  It’s true to say that WordPress has completely changed the face of Internet publishing because now anyone can create themselves an online presence quickly and easily.

As they say on the main WordPress website: “You’re in good company if you use WordPress”.  WordPress is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites worldwide and the latest version, version 3.0, had been downloaded over 32.5 million times as of February 2011.  Huge names such as the New York Times, CNN, Down Jones, Reuters, The Financial Times, Yahoo, Flickr, Le Monde, Martha Stewart, Ebay, The Wall Street Journal use WordPress either as their official site or as their blog.  But millions of small business owners, bloggers and hobbyists are also online thanks to the creation and availability of this wonderfully user-friendly publishing platform.

• It gives the power to the site owner, no more relying on a webmaster to make updates
• It has an extremely user friendly interface – you need no special knowledge to use it
• It’s free
• You can host it on your own website so you have entire control
• It can be made to do anything you want it to – hundreds of thousands of developers work on plugins to make it more and more flexible
• Because so many people use it, there is a huge support network for users and developers
• It’s the most-used blogging interface
• … but it doesn’t need to look like a blog
• It’s highly customisable
• It’s a huge time saver – making updates is a sinch
• You can change the entire look of your site by uploading a new template – in a few seconds
• It’s robust and reliable
• It’s secure – any security holes are fixed with frequent updates to the system.

As WordPress designer Jeff Starr has said:

“There is no reason to use anything else because WordPress can pretty much do it all.”