WordPress Logo

WordPress is an extremely popular, and free, open source system, which allows you to create a website or blog within minutes.

There are two flavours to WordPress, .com & .org, and depending on what it is you are wanting to do, either of them will provide you with the various tools to do so.

Up to, and including, WordPress 2.9, WordPress was considered a blogging platform.  An easy way to run a blog, with various tools made available.  However, version 3 changed all of this, and it instead became a fully-fledged Content Management System (CMS).

It is not likely that you will surf the web without seeing at least one WordPress site every day, though you may not even realise it.  At the last estimate, it was believed that 12% of websites have been created using WordPress.  This includes everything from a cat's homepage to Downing Street, though the former is probably of more interest.

WordPress.com
If you do not want to mess with hosting & uploading your own themes & plugins, then this is the best option for you. This allows you to sign up for a free WordPress website, and gives you access to various themes & plugins.

WordPress.org
This is the site for those who want to have full control over their website.  From here you can download the latest version of the software, as well as a large number of free themes & plugins.  As of today, there are 15,040 free plugins (which have been downloaded 193,316,676 times) and 1,403 themes (which have been downloaded 34,239,275 times).

Both flavours of WordPress have dedicated forums on the website and a large community of users who can help with any problem you may have.

Themes & Plugins?
Themes & plugins are what allow you to give your website a unique look & feel.  There are many places where you can craete a free website, but they either give you a generic look & feel or, put simply, are just useless for doing anything worthwhile.

With themes & plugins, you have the choice of wither using one of the free options, which are available or, if using the self-hosted .org version, you can purchase premium themes & plugins, the majority of which are priced low enough to make them worth buying to have a play.

For themes, I would suggest visiting Premium WP, which lists all of the top premium Themes, or if you go along to Theme Forest, you will find a large number of themes, and you can easily get help & support by those who created them.  The reviewing process on Theme Forest is very tough, so you know that if you buy a theme from there, it will do exactly as it says.

For plugins, I would suggest using Code Canyon (part of the same website as Theme Forest), as this has a large number of plugins, and again, you can easily ask your support questions.

Adding Further Functionality
If you'd like to do even more with WordPress, you can add extra functionality by using Multisite & BuddyPress.  Though still free, these will add functions to WordPress that you would expect to pay a lot for.

Multisite
Since version 3 of WordPress, Multisite has been included.  Up to, and including, version 2.9, this was a seperate download called WordPress Mu.  Multisite allows you to install a single version of WordPress, and then allow you to run multiple sites.  You can either do this for yourself, or you can allow members of your site to have a free WordPress themselves, in exactly the same way as WordPress.com works.

BuddyPress (www.buddypress.org)
If you ever fancied running your own social Network, this is exactly what BuddyPress does.  Members of your site will be able to share information, make friend requests, create groups and much more.

Further information
The following links will help you to understand a little more about WordPress:

The WordPress Codex
The Codex is the encyclopedia of all things WordPress. It is the most comprehensive source of information for WordPress available.

The Development Blog
This is where you'll find the latest updates and news related to WordPress. Bookmark and check often.

WordPress Planet
The WordPress Planet is a news aggregator that brings together posts from WordPress blogs around the web.

WordPress Support Forums
If you've looked everywhere and still can't find an answer, the support forums are very active and have a large community ready to help. To help them help you be sure to use a descriptive thread title and describe your question in as much detail as possible.

WordPress IRC Channel
Finally, there is an online chat channel that is used for discussion among people who use WordPress and occasionally support topics. The above wiki page should point you in the right direction. (irc.freenode.net #wordpress)

MakeUseOf.com
They provide this free pdf guide to creating a WordPress website, (password 'awd' will be removed from here soon to protect their copyright) along with several other guides available just through free registration. Sign up!

CreativePro WordPress tutorial - Using Dreamweaver for WordPress
part 1, part 2, part 3

To use the Wordpress.org system requires using a hosting company that provides some database support such as MySQL (you don't need to actually do anything with the database except through the WordPress interface).

Some hosts that include support:

Joe is currently working on a number of new websites, making full use of WordPress, including:

Writers-Site.com
This is a social networking website dedicated to writers.  Not only do they get the usual social networking tools, but they also get all the tools required to help them as writers.

To improve your Google friendliness Joe recommends that you set your Permalink preferences (in Site Admin > Options) using Custom Structure to /%category%/%postname%/

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