WordPress is now powering over 14% of websites and has over 50 million blogs on WordPress.com. It has 15,000 plugins that have been downloaded over 200 million times. WordPress.org allows more customization than WordPress.com and users have their own domain, while WordPress.com users are limited in customization but have an address with WordPress in the domain. Major publications like the Huffington Post and CNN use WordPress because it is customizable, allows multiple users/domains, has built-in SEO and analytics, and has a large community of resources.

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WordPress 101
An Introduction to WordPress
By Shanta R. Nathwani

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Some Statistics
As of August 19,2011:
 WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up
from 8.5%. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running
WordPress. These stats apply to both WordPress.com and WordPress.org
sites.
 In July, WordPress.com blogs passed the50 million mark. At the time,
WordPress revealed that each month, 287 million people account for 2.5 billion
pageviews on WordPress.com blogs.
 In his speech, Matt Mullenweg says that WordPress now has 15,000 plugins
and has seen 200 million plugin downloads. WordPress 3.2 had 500,000
downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade speed in the
blogging platform’s history.
Retrieved from TechCrunch September 7, 2012

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.Com vs. .Org
WordPress.com WordPress.org
 Hosted on the WordPress  Also known as “self-hosted”
servers
 Allows for customization of
 Gives an address like: almost everything, including
tantienhime.wordpress.com, but themes, plug-ins, permissions,
can have your own domain ($)
etc.
 Very little customization
 Space is only limited by the
 Can be seen on the WordPress hosting provider
home page
 Ability to upload video and
 No Plug-ins audio files “out of the box”

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Some Examples of My Own
WordPress.com:
 http://tantienhime.wordpress.com
WordPress.org
 http://malverncollegiate.com
 http://roxannereads.com

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Who Is Using WordPress?
 The National Post
 TechCrunch
 The Huffington Post
 CNN Blogs
 Mashable
 Time Magazine (blog)
 The Wall Street Journal

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Why Are They Using It?
 Highly customizable
 Allows for multiple users and multiple domains (including sub-
domains)
 Built in SEO, Analytics and framework
 Easy and cheap to use
 Millions of resources (themes, plugins and forums)
 Open Source

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An Important Distinction
Posts vs. Pages
Posts Pages
 Dynamic  Static
 Tags  No Tags
 More for blogging portions and  Used for Contact and About
news pages

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Another Important Distinction
Categories vs. Tags
Categories Tags
 Helps to determine the  Describes the content
structure of the website
 Use about 5-7 per post
 Can be used to create menus
much like pages