WordPress has become so much more than a blogging platform. It’s a full-featured content management system, which means it’s also more than just a website. Unfortunately, many small business websites are basically brochures that tell everyone who you are, what got you started, how to contact you, and a few pages about what you sell. But that’s it. They don’t do anything more than that. A blog is just a collection of articles and stories arranged in reverse chronological order about a variety of topics. It’s a public diary of sorts, covering an endless number of topics. But a content management system not only lets you build those web pages and write those articles, it makes it so simple to do, you don’t even need to hire a professional webmaster every time you want to make a simple change.

The theme is the outer layer of your website — the face, the facade, the style, the part that makes it look pretty. With WordPress themes, you can change between any number of different styles and layouts without having to dig into the guts of your code. Many of the premium themes are professionally designed and are built to have additional capabilities like helping with your SEO or working on mobile devices as well as desktop computers. There are some free themes that are equally as good as the premium themes, but be careful of free themes that seem to be missing a few components or don’t have a few of the bells and whistles that the premium themes do.

When people talk about web design and building a website, this is actually the part that freaks them out. They think there’s a lot of coding and design work that goes into making a single web page, and that adding the actual content is just a minor detail to be handled later. But in actuality, most of that design work is already done.

It’s easy to create a new page. But your mouse over the Pages or Posts menu in the left sidebar, click Add New, and you’ll see the Add New Page/Post window. Type in your title, add in your content, and click Publish.

Many websites, when you want to update them, require a phone call to your web designer. You have to work out an hourly rate, they’re going to take a few weeks to get things done, and you’re going to go back and forth several times, all the while dreading what this is doing to your budget. Not so with WordPress. With WordPress, it’s as easy as clicking a few buttons. You log into your WordPress site and click the Updates button on the left sidebar (under the Dashboard link). There, WordPress will tell you what needs to be updated. You can update your plugins, theme, and even WordPress itself in a matter of seconds. You can install security updates and change your theme without losing a single picture or blog post. And it didn’t cost you 1 hour of your web designer’s time to do it.

You don’t know how to make it secure. You don’t know how to make your calendar show up in the sidebar. You don’t know how to write forms for people to contact you. But you don’t need to, because you’ve got plugins to handle it for you. As of this writing, there are 58,570 plugins on WordPress.org, and they can make your WordPress site do anything. You can sell products and services, create an online community, set aside part of your website for members and subscribers, accept payments, display tweets from different Twitter feeds, or even display the standings of different sports leagues around the world.