In this article, we'll learn most of the fundamental aspects we need to know before we start our first WordPress website. We'll go through WordPress as a CMS, what all features WordPress has in store for us, the WordPress best practices that would help us eventually grow in the long run, and much more. I'm optimistic that this article will be a head start to provide that creative idea of yours a good shape and design!

Setting the context

We are in the digital age, and most of our everyday transactions happen over the internet. Be it shopping, sales and marketing, monetization, learning and education, and tons of other activities. Indeed, most of these platforms being Websites or Content Management Systems (CMS). Hence, it becomes paramount to know what these platforms are and how they work before we venture out to begin our website. In this article, we'll tour around WordPress, a popular CMS solution, and know what all it has to offer.

What is a CMS? And how can you get started with one?

Content Management System (CMS), as the name suggests, is a pretty straightforward concept of managing digital content. Which generally includes two components: An end-user who consumes the information on the website and has the privilege of adding and modifying data; And the other being the content creator who compiles and updates the website. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla are some of the popular CMSs out there.

WordPress as a CMS solution

In this article, we'll concentrate on WordPress CMS and set our foundations right! WordPress claims to have a user base of around 37% on the internet, making it one of the most popular CMS solutions. It can be a purposeful tool for anyone right from a naïve technical user to large enterprises. Ranging from personal blogs and technical tutorial forums to e-Commerce websites, they've got it all covered.

When we search for 'WordPress,' we have two search results coming up. One is Wordpress.com and the other WordPress.org. It's quite essential to know the critical differences between them. When we want to manage digital data on the internet, we need a server to host these web pages. That is nothing but the hosting platform, and this is the key difference we were talking about earlier. At WordPress.com, WordPress takes care of the web hosting services while at .org, you need to take care of it on your own from a third-party web hosting service.

Blogs and Websites

Blogs and websites could be useful for both personal and small businesses. WordPress offers a massive number of themes and plugin support for the same. With the help of WordPress.com, you could start one for free. However, your website/blog cannot have a customized domain name. It will look something like this, “www.myblog.wordpress.com.” And for a customized domain name, you will have to upgrade your plan, which brings us to plans and pricing.

Plans and pricing suitable for blogs and websites

• Personal: This is a minimalistic plan suitable for personal blogs/websites. They offer a free domain for a year with 6GB storage. It costs $4/per month.
• Premium: This is a popular plan suitable for much heavier blogs/websites. It comes with unlimited themes, extended payment options, and storage space of 13GB. It costs $8/per month.

eCommerce

WordPress offers Business plans for medium to large organizations for people who want to host a set of items for sale on the internet.

Plans and pricing suitable for business

• Business: This is suitable for small to medium businesses/start-ups who want to sell items online. It comes with customer support, all kinds of payment support, and unlimited access to WordPress themes and plugins. It has a storage capacity of 200GB with $24/per month.
• eCommerce: This is an ideal choice for large business organizations aiming for an online store. The additional benefits include personalized support, internationalization of payments and shipments, premium themes, and much more. The pricing is $45/per month.

Domain name and hosting for your website

So, now we know which plan to choose that best fits our needs. All the above plans and pricing we saw were for a website to be hosted in ‘WordPress.com.’ In which case, hosting and the domain name is taken care of.

As discussed earlier, we can also use third party web hosting services for our website. In that case, we should buy a hosting service, a domain name, and you could still download the WordPress software and use it. For people who want to know how things work inside, and want to have a hands-on experience, it is a perfect choice. Otherwise, we have WordPress.com, where everything is handled for you by WordPress.

Best practices for you as a beginner

• You should have a rough sketch of what you’re expecting and what your requirements are for your website. This will help you land on a suitable plan/pricing.
• WordPress has tons of themes to choose from, and a huge collection of plugins to support your website. You should be wise enough to get the best in range without compromising the performance of the website.
• To gain better traffic to your website, you should practice SEO standards and maintain keyword density.
• The first step towards anything is to begin! I encourage you to start, and things will follow up!