Technical Writing

Technical writing

Topic: Wordpress elements 

Wordpress is an open source tool used to build blogs by people and organizations to communicate with their target audience. It is the most popular tool, used by 37.6% people worldwide for its simplicity to create, and flexibility to edit blogs with no technical expertise (Osman, 2020).

Posts: Posts create the blog content (Ellice, 2018). Authors write posts on topics, publish and update them periodically. Wordpress maintains the date and time stamp of the posts and arranges them in reverse chronological order. Wordpress also provides other options on posts to categorize, tag or archive them from the site. The blog authors share a range of content on posts like knowledge on a particular topic, an opinion, report on events in an organization. A post includes text, images, or other media content. It should be structured uniformly throughout the blog to have a good appeal. The posts form the dynamic component of the blog and the periodic updates can be shared with people using the RSS feed.

Pages: Some part of the blog like the About Us, or Contact information remains static. To include this in the blog, Wordpress has the page option. The date and time stamp are missing from the page, so are the other options to tag or categorize them. The options for pages are sub-pages under a parent page, like the menu options, this feature is called the hierarchy. The RSS update feature to notify people is not applicable to pages. They help to structure the overall look of the blog.

Media: To grab the attention of the readers, posts and pages need to be embedded media content along with the text in the blog. Wordpress, gives the option of including different media content, like images, audio, video and document. The content can be uploaded from the computer or chosen from the media library. The add media tool in Wordpress, allows the media content to  be sized and aligned with the text as per the needs.

Themes: Themes give a Visual appeal to the blog. Wordpress offers different themes to choose depending on the content of the blog. Themes are designed with the intention to connect with the target audience and give them unique experience during their presence on the blog. Themes help to organize the content of the blog into pages, with an easy menu for navigation. The other options included in themes are color scheme, heading style, fonts and other features like login form. Free Themes can also be customized, there are premium themes also available.

Plugins: Apart from the basic features of posts, pages and themes, additional functionality on Wordpress can be availed through Plugins. The Open source feature of Wordpress allows many plugins to be written by volunteers in PHP script language. The plugins give the users to tailor their blogs by installing only those for the functionality they require. This way the blog remains not too heavily loaded with code. Some plugins available are SEO, e-commerce and security. If existing plugins are not sufficient, new ones can be written by the user. Plugins can be installed by the add -plugin feature in Wordpress and they can also be easily updated when the developers occasionally edit the plugins.

Comments: Blog posts written with the intention to start a discussion, can be made open for comments. Readers can write comments and this could lead to a discussion thread that can be an interesting way to collaborate, seek feedback, or validation on a post from readers. Comments are available on pages too, they are disabled by default, can be enabled if required. Wordpress gives the add-on features on comments like collecting information about the comment authors, number of nested replies, stipulated time for allowing comments.

Users: Users of Wordpress can create a blog to reach out to their target audience, without any technical expertise, and it involves not much of a learning curve. The end users or readers get a structured content on Wordpress with a good visual appeal.

Wordpress is an online tool with great features requiring little time and effort to set up a blog or website. The user-friendly feature makes it possible for anyone to create an engaging blog, stay connected with the readers, and send periodic notifications of the posts effortlessly. No wonder more than 500 websites are built using Wordpress everyday (Osman, 2020).