WordPress: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Introduction

When you decide to create a website, there are several paths you can take.

You could use a cookie-cutter website builder (like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace). But if you do, you lose the ability to customize every detail to get what you really want. And because these companies host whatever you build, you also give up final control over your website.

You could hire an expert (or a team of experts) to build a website for you. Find the right person, and you’ll get a great product. But how do you maintain it? How do you make changes, add content, and keep growing your site without asking your expert to make every change for you?

Or, you could choose a third path, and use the ridiculously popular publishing tool called WordPress. WordPress isn’t perfect. But it does an amazing job of keeping things as simple or as complex as you want. You start out with free themes that have beautiful typography and layouts. You get a content publishing system that makes writing new pages as easy as typing in a word processor. You can snap in more advanced features when you need them, like social media integration, search optimization, and even ecommerce. And, best of all, you control everything.

At the time of this writing, WordPress powers roughly one-third of all the world’s websites, according to the web statistics company W3Techs (see http://tinyurl.com/3438rb6). And while popularity can’t tell you everything, WordPress’s success has some great benefits:

• Updates. There’s a small army ...