You may have heard people talking about something called WordPress, but even with all the buzz, you may still not be sure what it is and how it works. Here's a summary:

WordPress is a system that lets you create your own website and control its content. Instead of creating a website from scratch, WordPress gives you a website that's already built, with a lot of features that are common to most websites. Using this as a starting point, you can then change the content of the website as well as its appearance to make it your own.

Every WordPress site has two parts: (1) the publicly accessible "front end," which is the website that everyone will see, and (2) the private "back end" or "admin" site, which you can only access by logging into with a username and password. Once you're logged in, you can use this "admin" site to update and maintain your website, from adding or changing pages to adding images and a host of other things.

Because WordPress lets you manage all the content on your website yourself, it's called a Content Management System (or CMS for short). WordPress is not the only CMS out there, but it is by far the most popular. And over the years it's become one of the most powerful.

WordPress is also free.

You read correctly: free.

So if it's free, and if the whole point is to allow you to create and maintain your own website, why on earth would you want to pay someone else to work on it for you? The truth is, websites are complicated systems, and even though WordPress has done an excellent job of putting more control in the hands of people like you, there are still a lot of things that you'll have to learn, think about and do if you want your website to be successful.

First of all, you'll have to learn how the whole system works, like the difference between pages and posts, what are themes and plugins, how to change the time zone for your site, etc. If you want to customize your WordPress site, you'll have to learn about child themes. Every now and then there are system updates, as well as updates for themes and plugins. From time to time, a plugin may develop a bug, and then you'll have to take the time to investigate and come up with a solution. There are also thousands of themes and thousands of plugins. Even for something as simple as adding a contact form to your website, there are many different options.

Doing the research to weed through these options can be time-consuming.

If all of that sounds like a welcome challenge to you, then you don't need anyone to help you. But if that sounds like an awful lot of work you'd rather not do, that's when it really pays to have someone help you out. It's a little bit like cooking: Sure, you can go shopping, get all the ingredients for a meal and cook it all yourself. Some people even find that fun. But sometimes you want someone else to do all that work. Sometimes they'll do it better than you ever could on your own. And that's why you would want to pay someone else to create a WordPress website for you.