Bullis Builds creates websites on the WordPress platform. What is WordPress, and what does that mean for your business?
At its heart, WordPress is publishing platform called a content-management system (CMS). It provides an easy way to add and manage website content.
It’s also a huge ecosystem of website themes and software solutions (called plugins) that give you flexibility to grow both your content and your website’s functionality.
A determined beginner can launch a WordPress website in a day. Yet WordPress can also serve as the backbone for huge websites. TechCrunch and The New Yorker server their massive amounts of content using WordPress. The Official Star Wars Blog runs on WordPress, as do the official websites for the New York Times Company and the Walt Disney Company.
Start with a few pages and pictures. Add a simple form, and you can generate a mailing list in a service such as MailChimp. Later you can add a store, display real estate listings, create entire online courses, or even set up your own social network.
Because of the way WordPress manages content, even once you’ve accumulate hundreds of posts and images, you can easily switch themes, instantly updating the look of your site.
Under the Hood
WordPress allows you to change the look of your website by keeping your website content — images, blocks of text, headlines, forms and so on — separate from the rules for how to display that content. The rules for displaying the content are called the website theme.
When someone visits a WordPress site, WordPress creates the webpage on the fly. It consults the theme, which tells it what content to retrieve and how to display it. WordPress then generates the HTML code the browser needs to display the page.
If you want the content to be displayed differently, all you need to do is switch themes.
How We Can Help with WordPress
There’s no reason a determined small business owner cannot build her own website.
The basics of WordPress are relatively straightforward. It takes a few steps, including finding a reliable web host that offers WordPress packages and choosing a theme that matches your business. But a solid day of work is enough to get a WordPress site up and running for the first time.
, which combined with the endless possibilities for growth, may account for its popularity — over 35% of websites use the platform. Of the sites complex enough to require a content managment system
The sheer weight of possibilities, however, can be daunting.
As I write, WordPress offers 7,393 free themes, a number that keeps growing. Hundreds of companies offer themes specialized for different businesses, bringing the total to over 30,000. WordPress also offers roughly 50,000 free plug-ins — modules that add functionality to your site.
Yet in spite of that diversity
WordPress is one of dozens of “content management systems” or CMS. Dozens of CMS’s exist, but WordPress dominates, accounting for 62% of the CMS market. You may have heard of competitors such as Squarespace and Wix thanks to their aggressive marketing efforts lately. Together they account for only 5% of the market.
Popularity online always has a downside: as with Microsoft, its prevalence makes it a target for hackers. But its popularity also ensures a critical mass of people are always working to identify and fix vulnerabilities. Bullis Builds follows best practices for security, which includes keeping WordPress updated and choosing Following best practices will protect the site. That includes keeping WordPress up to date, and carefully selecting
