A Beautiful Blogging and CMS platform

WordPress is open-source software that can be downloaded here

There are excellent support forums and plenty of documentation

Themes provide the look of your blog and plugins add extra functionality.

The great thing about WordPress is its flexibility – it’s possible to make it do virtually anything you want. It’s also frequently updated and just keeps getting better and better!

In More Detail …

WordPress is Open Source software, essentially meaning that anyone can contribute to it and anyone can use it (for free). The basic code was first written by jazz saxonphonist Matt Mullenweg in 2003. Matt is now part of a company called Automattic which employs seasoned developers of the code and owns the WordPress trademark. Automattic is the company behind the free Akismet anti comment-spam software incorporated into WordPress.

Technical Stuff

WordPress uses a modular, easily analysed system of code. The core files remain unmodified by end-users but a system of ‘Plugins’ can adapt functions from those core files and change the way in which WordPress works. Many, many people contribute plugins, which can be uploaded from within the WordPress user interface.

For WordPress designers there are ‘themes’. Themes use a few lines of code to output content that the user enters from within the web-based interface. Text, photos, videos and podcasts are typical content that can all be added to a WordPress website with ease. The designer’s job is not only to create a theme that looks nice but that also appeals to Search Engines (e.g.minimal duplicate content) and reflects the users’ desires (everything on a plate) and the website owner’s needs (such as funnelling traffic to new or important content).

The WordPress theme designer wraps HTML and PHP around a few lines of code that already exist within the default WordPress theme to make a new theme that will do its job. (HTML and PHP are essentially software code.) Alchemweb uses its own basic theme created from a stripped-down and modified version of the default theme, and builds up from there, creating a final website that is tailored to the client’s needs and that uses rock-solid code.