This article attempts to show how the components of Wordpress fit together to help you build your “living blog”.

1. The Wordpress Base Code:

When you first decide that you want to produce a website or blog, and you select Wordpress as your choice of authoring tool, then imagine this as the conception and the “birth” of your Blog. When you first install Wordpress, then your baby blog is now born… it has everything you need to start your blog growing, but you need to nurture it, feed it and love it to help it grow and build it’s character.

2. The Wordpress Theme:

Selecting a Wordpress theme gives your blog two thing’s.

• Firstly the templates for Pages and Posts that provide the Structure of your blog, the living blog’s skeleton.
• Secondly the theme will have a stylesheet, this is the look and feel of your site, it’s Clothes, style and part of it’s character.

3. The Content. Pages and posts.

As you start to add pages of content and posts to your blog, this is where you add the muscles, the living tissue, the brain, nerves, organs, veins and arteries. The content you add gives your blog it’s life blood and it’s spirit. Without your content, your blog is lifeless. As you build the content, your blog will develop it’s character.

4. The Plugins:

Plugins are snippets of code written by smart people that help to add specific functionality to your blog. They give your blog special skills to do new tasks and tricks. Adding Plugins are like sending your blog to school and university, or sending it on a specialist training course. Some Plugins can help to make your blog more productive, help it to connect with other blogs. They can help your blog to earn money. They are the working tools for your blog to use.

5. The Theme Stylesheet (or CSS)

Previously mentioned in the Theme section, the Stylesheet defines how pages and posts are displayed, which fonts and font sizes are used for each section. It defines color and any background images to use and everything related to how your blog looks. The Stylesheet is your blogs fashion sense… It’s spirit, soul and character will be defined by the content written in posts and pages, but the way it appears is defined by the Stylesheet.

I hope this light hearted article can help you picture the bulding blocks for your Wordpress Blog.