Key Components of a WordPress Site
There are some things that need a bit of explaining before we get much deeper. For lack of a better term, we’ll call them “components.” Components represent the main parts of a WordPress site, including the actual files that make things go, and the database that houses all of the data. Together, these two components - the files and database - generate the web pages for your site. Once generated, there are two central types of these web pages, the Admin area that only you see, and the public pages that the whole world can see. Let's take a closer look at each of these different components.

WordPress Core Files
When you go to WordPress.org and download a copy of WordPress, you are down­loading the WordPress core files. It’s a big folder full of files and a few subfolders full of even more files. Once you download and unzip the WordPress package, you’ll notice that most of the file and folder names begin with a “wp-” prefix.

The WordPress core files are the things that make WordPress tick, the things that make WordPress a complete software package. Most of these files you’ll never touch. A few of them you’ll touch very rarely, and a certain subset of these files you’ll be in and out of all the time, especially when building a theme.

The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a major building block of the Web. For this discussion, you need to be aware of the difference between absolute and relative URLs and how each one can affect your HTML coding. In an absolute URL, the address includes the entire file location (including the server name). A relative URL only shows the file name relative to the current location.

For example:

http://www.someweb.com/somefolder/somefolder_2/somefile.html somefile.html

Like most other open-source applications, ImageMagick can be installed and configured on many platforms.

Where to get ImageMagick
You can find many ImageMagick ftp and http download links on the Internet. But I suggest you download it from the original website, because the links in that site always lead you to the newest version of the program. Sometimes third-party websites update their links with a delay (unless they use the syndication solution for their download links).

Moreover, during the lifetime of a released version there are often some bugs and enhancements that are issued by ImageMagick users and based on these reports, the development team of ImageMagick will make any required changes and update the related link. Sometimes, in these cases other third-party websites may lose the chance to detect the updated features and resolved bugs in the current version.

There’s a reason why some people are described as artistic; moreover, there’s a reason why the more talented ones make a nice salary—having the talent and natural artistic ability to be a good (or great) designer is not easy. I am not one of those artistic people; however, I am frequently asked to play the role of designer when working with technology. And, if I’m guessing correctly, you are asked (or soon will be asked) to play that same role. Indeed, those of us working within technology fields are asked to wear many hats that often are outside our direct area of expertise and experience.

The interesting (and frustrating) thing about HTML is that it is not by design a feature-rich tool set for manipulating graphics. Indeed, the very opposite is true; in its original (and, for the most part, subsequent) incarnations, HTML was designed for very simple text markup, not for exact or otherwise sophisticated graphic design. Still, many people think of HTML as a graphics tool. Although the Web is by nature a communication medium that invites the utilization of graphics, tweaking HTML to fit your graphical presentation requirements can be a challenge.

However, there are some things you can do to strengthen your work. Using tables, frames, and other goodies in the HTML tool bag, you can actually create some pretty sharp-looking Web pages. This chapter will focus on some of the most basic (but critical) design issues by looking at a variety of basic text-formatting techniques.

WordPress makes controlling the content of a website easy. It can be done by you, or you can train another person to do it, because the Admin area is as intuitive as it is powerful. WordPress gives you the keys to build sites easily with all the modern features that clients crave. And because WordPress is free, open source, and has fostered a giant community around it, you’ll always be in good hands. WordPress has changed the face of publishing content on the web, and we are all reaping the benefits. For all these reasons and more, we can safely say that WordPress is amazing.

How to Optimize and Secure WordPress
Out of the box, and with a full cup of common sense, WordPress is a reasonably se­cure software package. But if you are up to snuff as a web designer/developer, you understand the importance of security and know that it is up to you to do every­thing possible to keep your site safe and secure. There are a slew of precautionary measures you can take to help with security, and we’ll show you all of them. Things like locking down sensitive files, checking file permissions, and using various mani­festations of "security-through-obscurity."

While we are at it, we'll customize our sites to streamline and optimize the effi­ciency of WordPress. Many of the things that can make WordPress faster are also things that can make any site faster, like reducing HTTP requests and optimizing images. But there are many WordPress-specific things you can do as well, like cach­ing data, keeping your database optimized, and reducing the number of database queries.