In the early days of the internet, highly skilled web designers and developers created sites using the Hyper Text Markup Language, better known as HTML. HTML is a programming language that contains complicated instructions called âtags.â Tags are used to format text, add images, video, audio, or tables. When a browser accesses a web page, it reads and interprets the HTML tags to render and display the content, hopefully in the format the web designer intended. In HTML, tags are used to manage and format a websiteâs content in the browser.
Here is an example of an HTML pageâs source code:
Complex, isnât it? And this is a very simple page that displays a table with a single row and three columns as in the following example:
| Data | Data | Data |
Thatâs a lot of source code to write for something that takes just a few clicks to create in a word processor.
Nowadays, you can install WordPress on your own web server in about 5 minutes. Once itâs installed you can utilize its simple, easy-to-use built-in editor to create your web pages and blog posts without ever having to learn HTML.
WordPress is built upon two of the most popular technologies in the world: PHP and MySQL. PHP is a programming language and MySQL is a relational database system. Because of these technologies, WordPress can run on virtually any modern-day web server and you donât have to learn anything about either.
WordPress doesnât store its content in files, but in the MySQL database. Each page on your site is created dynamically by WordPress every time a user visits one of your pages. This means as people access your site with their browsers, WordPress creates the pages they see in real time as they access your site. This real-time rendering helps keep your content fresh.