WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) that is the backbone for a huge part of the internet. The system is free and highly flexible.

WordPress can be installed on your own platform (self-hosted, free) or be operated by wordpress.com (hosted, not free). A lot more common is the self-hosted variation but both are valid options.

Fun Fact: At the time of writing 26% of all websites are managed with WordPress.

Examples

The most basic thing you can do with WordPress is operating a blog. But you can also use it to start a webshop, a portfolio, basically every kind of website you can think of.

How

We’re talking about the self-hosted way of installing wordpress here. Instead of me telling you what has been told many times before I’ll send you over to WordPress’ famous 5-Minute Install Instructions

If you need some more instructions I’d recommend to head over to youtube and do a simple search. Pick a suitable video and get some guidance for the process.

A few tips

The Install Instructions by wordpress should successfully guide you through the installations process. A few things to consider:

• Think about where to put the wordpress files – it’s not trivial to change that location. I’d recommend to put the files in a sub-folder as it keeps things nice and clean. Especially if you’ll have multiple domains at some point. You’ll just have to direct your domain to that folder in your web-hosting settings.
• If you work on your wordpress site before you want to show it publicly you might uncheck „Allow search engines to index this site“ during installation – be sure not to forget to reenable that option later, otherwise your website won’t show up in google or any other search engine.

Installing WordPress locally

So you don’t have a website yet or you do want to test things locally before you put it all online? There is a great tool for that, it’s called MAMP. What it’ll do is emulating a web-server completely with a mysql-database. So you have everything you need to run wordpress on your local computer.

I’d really recommend trying to get that up and running because it’s a completely free way of testing the waters with wordpress.

Want some more guidance here? As always, there are plenty of good tutorials out there.