So, you may have heard all about Wordpress but you're not really sure what is Wordpress exactly? Well Wordpress is a blogging and Content Management System (CMS) which has been around for about 8 years as of 2011.

Starting life purely as a system to help people blog (short for Web Log, also known as an internet journal), Wordpress rapidly grew far beyond that and morphed into the CMS that we know and love today, allowing individuals and businesses much more freedom in managing the content of their sites. Famous brands such as Lexus, Time Magazine, Ford and hundreds and thousands more use Wordpress to power their sites.

Wordpress uses the power of their Tags, Categories, Posts and Pages system, to allow great flexibility in design and managing a site.

Categories are like broad well, categories for your content. Think you have a Recipe site, all your categories would be the types of food or cooking styles, Baking, Roasting, Beef recipes, Pork recipes, etc. Generally a post will have one category.

Tags on the other hand are more like quick descriptive words attached to a post. Say you have a post about a cherry pie, you can tag it Cherry, Pie, Crust, Desserts,

Pages are, for all intents and purposes, static. You can change the content of it but they never usually change dynamically. Think of an About Me page, once its up you rarely if ever need to change the information. A Wordpress Page is perfect for that job.

Posts however are more dynamic, and which posts are displayed is dependant on how you set the site up. Think of a standard blog where you write about your life, the posts appear in date order, latest first, oldest last.

But what about our recipe site? You don't want the recipes listed in the same order as the blog, but in a more organized way. Well here the posts are dynamic based on the categories they are in. So when you click one category, say Desserts, you get a list of all the posts with a category label of Desserts, but no other posts. Then you click a category called Starters, the desserts posts go and you get all the posts labelled Starters.

If you add on to that, that Wordpress can be customised with Themes (think of these as clothes for your site) and Plug-ins (extra code that can be bolted onto the site to add extra functionality without having to know code!) and Widgets (areas with the theme where you can simply drag and drop things like calendars, latest posts etc), then you quickly realise that Wordpress is beyond powerful and yet easy to use for the average user.

So, in conclusion, Wordpress is a dynamically driven blogging system that has become a CMS that can power virtually any type of site