WordPress is a software application that lives on a web-server. It contains everything you need to create a web-site (with as many web-pages as you want) and then transform those pages & present them as a website to people who browse the web and visit your web-site.
Community
The most unique quality of WordPress is not its technical capabilities or functionality but rather that it is a community. WordPress is an open-source software application which means it’s developed by a community of developers and is offered to you to use freely, without any limitations. This is actually protected by a unique license agreement which promises that no-one can inhibit that freedom – it is actually illegal for anyone to limit what you can do with WordPress – forever. The WordPress community is active in many countries and languages, it includes developers, designers, support forums, and what not.
When you choose to use WordPress you are essentially connecting with all these people, their intentions connect with yours.
WARNING: There are people who abuse the qualities of the WordPress community. As a rule of thumb everything related to the WordPress software is offered free of charge (donations are always appreciated and a great way to say thank you). There are some so called “Premium” services around WordPress which charge for their services – some of them are legitimate, others are not. If you encounter such services, see how they resonate with the values of the community. Most of the quality Premium providers also offer some of their services/products freely to the WordPress community – they will be soft-spoken, generous and heartful. The lesser/abusive ones will try to bait you in and usually their services/products don’t hold a candle to similar solutions available freely within the community.
Functionality
WordPress is actually a bundle of two application that work together seamlessly:
- Admin is an application made available only to you (or other authorized people of your choosing) and enables you to create the web-pages you want visitors to see and decide how those pages should be presented to viewers – this is called the Admin part of WordPress.
- Blog is an application that displays those web-pages to viewers who visit your web-site.
You will probably spend most of your time using the Admin while most visitors will be experiencing the actual Blog.