A potential client contacted me recently to set up a web site. Her photography instructor informed her that she needed a web site for her business. And he advised her to, “Set it up in WordPress. It’s easy.”
This got me thinking: “So just how easy is it to set up a web site in WordPress?”
And the answer I came up with is: “It depends.”
Because WordPress is such a useful tool for developing a website, it is similarly useful to explore the “depends” part in more detail.
Do you want your own domain
WordPress began as a blogging tool. It initially was designed to show several paragraphs as text that scrolled in reverse, chronological order. Sign up for an account on WordPress.com, give yourself a unique account name, and presto you are now a blogger. Add text and a picture on a daily basis and you are a published author. Could you be happy with [yourname].wordpress.com as a web site? If the answer is yes, then you have a quick and free web site.
WordPress is also an open source content management system that can be installed on a web host and customized to run highly complex web site. With the proper knowledge, you can make WordPress do many, many things. I would not go so far as to say anything, but there’s a lot that it can do. And when designed and developed properly, with proper training it can be handed off to a client with limited technical knowledge to do subsequent updates. This is why WordPress is so appealing to web developers.
Making WordPress do all these miraculous things, however, is not so simple. Some of the miracles include making it look, act, and behave the way that you would like it. This involves planning, preparation, and getting into its guts and eviscerating it. This part can be easy or it can be difficult.
So when someone talks about the ease of using WordPress remember that it depends on which of the several faces of WordPress they’re looking at.