You don’t need to be a developer to manage your WordPress blog

“Can you guide me on how to make a website/blog?”, I get this question quite often. And more often than not, they don’t believe me when I say it is just a matter of few minutes to set up a basic, simple site. Only when you take them through the steps of setting up say, a WordPress blog, do they realise it is indeed a few clicks. One of them actually told me, “I feel so silly to have been afraid of setting this up myself.”

The logical next question, “Do I need to know programming to manage my blog?” And here’s my chance to show them what WordPress is really capable of. My answer, “Nope!” and just one other word, “Plugins“.

Of course, writing and publishing a basic blog post is as easy as writing a document on your computer. But, even beyond that, the world of themes and plugins just make managing your blog so accessible.

Power of Plugins
What are plugins, you ask? Plugins allow you to add features to your stripped-down blog. Sure, they have software to make the features work, but a blogger/site-owner doesn’t need to bother with that. Well-rated, popular plugins almost always will make it as easy as is possible for you to apply the said feature to your blog.

And yes, there are more than enough well-rated, popular plugins that will more than likely have the features you need. Moreover, there is a very high chance that they will allow you to customize the feature to your satisfaction.

There are two main things that you would like for your blog:

• For it to look prettier, and more importantly for you to be able to tweak things around so that it looks aesthetically pleasing.
• Add features to make your blog more accessible, functional and contemporary.

Managing the design of your blog
You have more than 2700 themes at your disposal. You can pick the color scheme, number of columns, the kind of layout, the features you want built-in the theme, and category. Each of the themes, especially the well-rated, popular ones, will give you options to change these features around a bit too.

In addition you have plugins that help you tweak things around that aren’t accorded by the theme. You have CSS Hero that lets you drag and drop pieces from your theme. Not only that, it allows you to make changes to the other design elements of your blog, like say the header, font properties and so on with a very easy-to-use and intuitive panel. Sure, you can use CSS Hero only for “Hero ready” themes, but they offer a reasonable variety too.

Managing the features on your blog

Yes, you read that right.  33,000+ plugins classified by more than 150 tags. Again, from the ‘look and feel’ to a specific feature you might have seen elsewhere – these plugins ought to have it all.

There are plugins that help you with compliance requirements too. Like say WP Legal Pages that helps you put in disclaimers or terms and conditions pages or plugins that allow you to pick images that are free of copyrights.

In short, if you’ve thought of a functionality, you have it ready to use. They are quick and easy to install and you can easily enable or disable them. The only challenge might be knowing what the feature is called, so you can look for it more efficiently. That too, it is only to a plugin’s advantage if it is tagged appropriately, so many of them are easy to find.

So, unless you have a very, very specific need and you want every corner of your blog customized, you don’t really need to be a developer to manage your blog. Even in that case, I’d say you should go through the various ready-made yet customizable options available thoroughly. You might just find what you are looking for.

So, what are you waiting for?

photo credit: Pete Prodoehl via photopin cc