Chapter 13
The WordPress Solution

You can take the web­pages from the WYSIWYG inter­face of your HTML author­ing pro­gram and copy and paste them into the WYSIWYG inter­face of Word­Press blog posts or pages. Keep in mind also that you can write direct­ly into the Word­Press WYSIWYG inter­face using it as a word proces­sor. Or you can write in a word proces­sor and copy and paste your chap­ters into the WYSIWYG inter­face of Word­Press blog posts and pages.

Word­Press itself pro­vides you with menus that con­sti­tute auto­mat­ic nav­i­ga­tion built into the Word­Press web­site-author­ing sys­tem. This nav­i­ga­tion capa­bil­i­ty and oth­er capa­bil­i­ties can enhance your web­book eas­i­ly and efficiently.

In addi­tion, Word­Press pro­vides the capa­bil­i­ty for third-par­ty pro­gram­mers to cre­ate plu­g­ins which fur­ther extend the capa­bil­i­ties of Word­Press itself. Many plu­g­ins are free, and oth­ers can be pur­chased, but they all enable you to do things beyond sim­ple HTML5 and CSS.

Per­haps Word­Press’ great­est con­tri­bu­tion to your web­book is that it pro­vides you with com­pre­hen­sive nav­i­ga­tion. You can do your chap­ters either as web­pages or blog pages, and togeth­er with the wid­get and menu capa­bil­i­ties of Word­Press, you can have nav­i­ga­tion on every page in a right col­umn or left col­umn. In addi­tion, Word­Press enables you to show menu bars. And don’t for­get that Word­Press Search (easy to imple­ment) is a sub­sti­tute for an index.

The thing to watch out for with Word­Press is how it dis­plays its inter­face on a phone. Remem­ber that 70% of dig­i­tal book read­ers read on their phone rather than a tablet, lap­top, or desk­top, and accord­ing­ly the phone for­mat is very impor­tant. Many Word­Press themes are respon­sive. That means that they will respond with a dif­fer­ent for­mat when accessed by a phone (i.e., one that makes sense and works well on a phone).

The spe­cial for­mat for phones is typ­i­cal­ly lin­ear. That is, text (con­tent) appears first, and the menu (Table of Con­tents) appears below. By test­ing your Word­Press web­book on desk­tops, lap­tops, tablets, and phones, you will come to get a feel­ing of how things work out with a par­tic­u­lar Word­Press theme and adjust the design of your web­book to make sense for all users.

In addi­tion, Word­Press enables easy embed­ding of audio, video, and col­or images in your text. In oth­er words, it han­dles diverse media well.

The Word­Press capa­bil­i­ty to use plu­g­ins is a spe­cif­ic ben­e­fit. The plug-ins are sim­ply addi­tion­al pro­gram­ming cre­at­ed by third par­ties that extend the capa­bil­i­ties of Word­Press itself. Con­se­quent­ly, you can do almost any­thing you want to in a web­page via the good work of third-par­ty pro­gram­mers. With HTML you can make your web­book any­thing you want it to be. You can do the same with Word­Press. It is very flex­i­ble and is designed for ease of use. And of course, Word­Press pages are HTML webpages.

CMS  WordPress is actually a content management system (CMS) as well as a website authoring program. Besides just enabling you to create webpages it also provides a lot of extra programming functions that help you to organize and structure your webbook.

Disclaimer

It is not my pur­pose to glo­ri­fy Word­Press or lead you to believe that it is the prime solu­tion for your web­book. Indeed, I have sim­ply includ­ed it is it as an exam­ple of what the pos­si­bil­i­ties are of using a web­site-author­ing sys­tem such as Word­Press. There is plen­ty of oth­er soft­ware that com­pete with Word­Press and is cer­tain­ly capa­ble. Pre­sum­ably you will care­ful­ly choose the one that best accom­mo­dates what you want to do with your webbook.