WordPress is what's known as a Content Management System, or CMS for short.
It essentially allows non-techies to make changes to a website.
With a little bit of time spent reading and learning, anyone could build their own WordPress website. It is designed to be very accessible for anyone.
You get to choose a theme, which dictates how your pages are laid out, and what colours they use, and you just fill in the gaps.
WordPress is also used by some "web-designers", as a very quick way to build a new website for clients.
It's important to note here, that they're typically not doing much "building" or in-fact "designing", the majority of that has been done for them.
If someone is using WordPress to build your website, they're probably also going to buy a theme, for roughly $15, and charge you a premium for putting it online.
You could feasibly do all this yourself.
Not that you want a WordPress site in the first place.
WordPress is best-known for being a blogging platform. The term blog is short for "web log".
It can be used to build a "normal" website, and for something small this can work, but it's not really what it was designed for.
The entire WordPress platform has been pushed and squeezed in directions it wasn't really intended.
As such, it is a bit of a monster these days, and in the wrong hands, can quickly turn into a royal mess.
Many of my clients come to me after having had a WpordPress website built for them, which is slow, and doesn't bring any new customers. In some worst-cases, a website built in WordPress can actually damage your business.
I've been programming since I was around 7 years old.
I have 3 A-Levels, including Computing and Mathematics.
I have been traditionally trained in Computer Science - I hold a Bachelor of Science degree (with Honours) in Computing Mathematics.
I have over 20 years of commercial experience in web development, managing teams, and designing complex platforms.
I have helped physically build the Internet, and know pretty much everything there is to know about the World Wide Web.
Do I choose WordPress? No.
Most of my days are actually spent putting WordPress in the bin.
Clients come to me with a website that isn't performing well, it's slow and cumbersome, and on first glance I'm not surprised.
Usually it's been built by some bloke in India, on WordPress, for $5 an hour.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
Hiring a professional developer, can look expensive when you compare hourly rates, but an experienced web developer will usually work at twice the speed, usually a lot more.
Experienced developers also won't get stuck on a problem for 5 hours.
The first thing to bear in mind is that a cheaper developer will typically take twice as long (usually a lot more) than an experienced developer. So paying twice the hourly rate is actually cheaper.
When I fix or do something in 30 minutes, it took me 20 years to be able to do it that quick. You're paying for the years, not the minutes.