One of the biggest challenges to learning how to build a WordPress site without a developer is that you're often working through kind of a mishmash of tutorials and it's really hard sometimes to see those in context or see the big picture of, how does my work get from point A, my desk at home to point B, my audience somewhere out in the world, across the internet? 

So today, I'm gonna talk a little bit about some technical terms that you'll need to know and that we'll cover in more detail as part of the course. But really what I wanna do is paint the big picture for you. So that you have a map in your head and you can kinda place things into the proper spots, into the proper context as we dig deeper. This is gonna allow you to understand what's going on under the hood a lot better but it's also gonna allow you to make decisions about what matters and what doesn't matter as you work through the process of building your own site. 

So let's start with WordPress, which is a Content Management System. So WordPress is fundamentally software. It allows you to login with a password, choose a page on your site or create a new page and edit the content on that page. That's pretty much the simplest way to explain it and the simplest functionality that you'll see from WordPress, but it's also, you know, basically 90% of what you're gonna be doing as part of your project of building a new site. Two terms that you'll hear that are kind of under the hood things are PHP and MySQL.

PHP is your code. It's literally just text that sets up logic. So if the user presses the save button, go through this process to save the text that they added to that page. When that happens, your content gets saved to a database which runs on a platform called MySQL most of the time. So, your code is usually pretty much static. It doesn't really change it just sets up the logic and then it saves data to your database. So when you, for example type in a bunch of content into a page, that content gets saved as text into a database. 

So when you think about that, WordPress is really a mechanism for allowing you to save stuff and then allowing your audience to retrieve it when they visit your site in the future. In order to do that, they need to go through infrastructure which is physical stuff like computers and fiberoptic cables around the world to get the data that you have saved, in your database to their computer so they can render it and see it and enjoy your website. 

So anytime we talk about infrastructure we're talking about the stuff that basically makes the internet work and allows you to transfer stuff from your computer or your WordPress database to somebody else elsewhere in the world. Hosting falls into this category. We're gonna talk a lot about hosting choices down the road. Things like buying a domain like your .com domain. Things like DNS and firewall which are a little bit more complex but we're still gonna talk about them because they're things that you need to at least understand so that you can choose to deal with them or not deal with them down the road. But they're all kinda bits and pieces of the infrastructure, just like you need to understand highway signs and how highways work to drive a car. You don't necessarily need to be able to build your own road or build your own highway interchange, right? But you need to understand what an onramp is and why you might use it, right? 

So, we're gonna talk about it in the context of using these tools. You're not gonna necessarily need to become an IT expert but you need to be able to say, you know, this is a DNS issue and here's how I change it and I'll help you through that process. There's not that many of these things but I'm gonna call out the ones that matter especially at this early stage in the process and help you get a handle on them and why they matter and when to deal with them and when to ignore them. Email is another infrastructure thing. I'll help you set that up. It can be complex and annoying but we'll do it in a way that makes it straightforward and simple for you. 

The last component on our list here is gonna be your audience. So this is everybody else out in the world. Your audience is using a bunch of other hardware and software. They have their own computers, they have web browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari. They may be on desktop they be on mobile, you may want to track them in different ways like setting up analytics on your site so that you can see which pages they're viewing, which web browsers they're using, what time of day they're coming to your site. These are all things that take place on the other end of the infrastructure that are happening among your audience. 

So, we have a map here. You could draw this map in a million different ways. Now I'm gonna show you why I've set it up the way that I have. This is a system or a map that is ranked in terms of how much control you have over each component of it. On the content management side, you have tons of control especially with WordPress. But regardless of what you're doing in terms of how you build your site, you have control over what your site looks like. You have control over the content, you have control over the pages. Essentially you own it. There are some limitations but you have a ton of control over what happens in the content management portion of this process. As you move down into infrastructure, you have less control. This is one of the reasons that I'm gonna encourage you to spend a little bit more on web hosting and use higher end infrastructure services because every time you choose an infrastructure service you'll have the opportunity to go cheap. Like $3 a month for hosting for example. The problem is that, that cheap stuff breaks down and when your infrastructure breaks down, it's extraordinarily difficult to get it back to life quickly and it's often even difficult to diagnose what's wrong because there's a lot of pieces in the infrastructure and the more cheap components you have, the more likely you are to get into trouble and have a site that goes down for an extended period of time or just waste a ton of your time figuring stuff out that would be simple in Plug and Play with a higher end infrastructure provider. 

The third component here is your audience. You have almost no control over the hardware and software they use and what they do. So you're gonna see different browsers render things a little bit differently. Mobile devices are much different than desktop devices. Within the group of mobile devices there are dozens of different phones or tablets that people might have. So, I wanna set this up for you because the key here is to accept that you can't control what your audience does or what kinda software they use. To accept that infrastructure is a difficult problem to solve and that people who have solved it well charge you more and that's okay. And to understand that you have a ton of control over what happens within WordPress, especially as you move through the course but you have to use that control and make decisions with the understanding that the farther away you get from WordPress and the stuff that you're creating, the less control you have. So, these sort of levels of control will factor into all of our decisions down the road and will help us determine you know, what to invest in and what not to invest in and what to worry about and what not to worry about as you go through and you build your site.