If you work from home or are trying to get that elusive first project, creating a professional website is an important step. As a home for your business, your website can showcase your skills, provide details of your experience, and give potential clients and customers a convenient way to get in touch.

What’s more, being able to create or work with a website is a useful skill in itself. For many people that work at home, the ability to get a website up and running is an additional service that can be sold to your existing clients.

You don’t need to spend a fortune getting a website developed for you. You can do it yourself, even if you have never had any experience. Thankfully, there is a secret – WordPress. WordPress is a free system that streamlines and simplifies the process of web development and, as you will find out, can still be flexible enough for just about any website imaginable.

What Does WordPress Do Besides Blogging?

Many people have heard of WordPress, but do not understand the full capabilities of the system. Most people think that WordPress is a platform for blogging when, in fact, it is far more than that.

Today, WordPress has grown into what would be called a content management system, or CMS. A CMS is a tool to store all of the information required for your website and present it to your visitors in a professional, organized way. Other content management systems include Joomla and Drupal, but the reality is that WordPress is the easiest to understand, the easiest to work with, and the most easily adaptable.

Let’s look at – in simple terms – how exactly WordPress works once it is installed:

• You access a convenient WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface to securely work with all of the content on your website
• You can create new web pages in a variety of formats
• The content that you create is stored in a database
• You can use the same interface to edit your content in the database
• When visitors access your website, the information in the database is presented to them in a website layout. You can change this layout at any time and your content will automatically adopt the right look

In technical terms, WordPress is fairly advanced. In the nine years since the platform first launched, this advanced functionality has been used in all kinds of exciting ways.

Why Should You Use WordPress?

You may be wondering why people choose WordPress as their CMS. The answer is because WordPress can make just about anything that you want to do easier, quicker and more convenient!

Press agency Reuters uses WordPress to keep journalists up to date with the latest news as it happens. Music streaming service Spotify powers its entire website with WordPress.

WordPress makes creating, editing and organising your content simple and, as a result, less time-consuming. That gives you more time to focus on other areas of your business. WordPress also gives you the chance to get a professional design to make your website look great – often free of charge.

The best way to see how WordPress streamlines setting up your website is to try it for yourself. WordPress is easy to install on your web hosting or, if you sign up on the WordPress website, you can explore its features with no set-up required.

Installing WordPress Made Easy

There are a few different ways to get started with WordPress, depending on your budget, your expertise and whether you use a web hosting service.

If you are just trying out WordPress and do not have your own web hosting, visit signup.wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. You will be guided through the entire process of creating your WordPress site, which will be stored on the WordPress servers for you. It is also possible to pay for a custom domain name (the address of your website) during the sign-up process.

Alternatively, if you already have a web hosting plan that supports PHP and MySQL, you can install your own WordPress on your server. This can be done by visiting WordPress.org and downloading the necessary files. The website also offers a convenient guide to installing WordPress in 5 minutes.

Finally, see if your web hosting provider offers an automatic script installer such as Softaculous. If so, you will be able to log in from your web hosting control panel and install WordPress in just a few clicks.