Hey everybody, Mike Linville here from Black Dog Education with this week's
installment of Office hours where we answer your questions about web design web development
and online marketing. This week's question comes from David. David writes - I am confused
I'm working on a new website for my company and I'm talking to a lot of different developers
I hear a lot of talk about Word press but I don't really know what it is. Is it a blog
is it a website what's going on. Should I be looking at this as a viable option for
my business thanks in advance, David. David I want to thank you for your question. It's
actually a really common question and I want to congratulate you as well cause as you know
the big man says any time you experience confusion in your life that means you're just about
ready to learn something. So let's talk about about WordPress according to their website
WordPress is a powerful semantic publishing platform. Yeah I don't know what that means
either. That may be a cause of a lot of the confusion but here's the thing. WordPress
started out life about nine years ago, 2003, as a blogging platform. Back then blogging
was a lot less sophisticated than what you see now. Blog is short for Web log was basically
a chronological journal that super nerdy used and they would talk about things like video
games and Star Wars and the newest burrito from Taco Bell or whatever. Not real mainstream
back in the early days okay, but here's the thing, over the last nine years technology
has come a long way. Applications like WordPress and Drupal and Juma and all these other online
services now served a much larger purpose. So my definition, I'm not going to use WordPress',
my definition is that WordPress is a kick ass content management system. It's got a
low cost of entry, it allows you to build search engine optimized websites and it's
open source so it's easily customizable. You can do anything you want. You can create your
own pages, you can create your own posts, you can upload videos and documents using
their media manager you can change the theme, the way the website looks with the click of
a button. It's super easy. So what started out life as a blogging tool is now used to
drive some of the world's most popular world-class websites companies like CNN, NASA, Mashable,
TechCrunch a lot of these sites are using WordPress to drive some of their own stuff.
So to get back to your question David, should I use WordPress or is WordPress a viable option
for my business? Absolutely yes the combination of WordPress with a decent developer that
knows how to customize is going to be able to give you a clear, clean, well designed
search engine optimized website that makes it super easy for you to publish content and
we all know content is king and that's what search engines are looking for right now.
So David I hope that has answered your question I hope that served you if you like this video
make sure you like it, pass it around to your friends if you got anything to add make sure
that you leave a comment down below. Again my name is Mike Linville from Black Dog Education,
thank you for stopping by, and we'll see you next time.