WordPress isn’t just a program – its a community and a platform. For those who are not familiar WordPress provides a method for those of us who want to blog and host our own blogs if we wish – or have them hosted elsewhere but still control most if not all the functionality.
Once installed and configured you ould quite happily stick with the standard setup and with the default look to your WordPress blog. However where it really comes into its own is when you use some of the community supplied themes and plugins – those modules which extend the existing capabilities or add whole new ones to WordPress.
The first one i was introduced to was Akismet – whch did away with the comment spam that can plague your site. Now I don’t know how I lived without.
Take a look at the wordpress.org site just to get a feeling for the range and diversity of the plugins availlable – and if you cannt find what you are after you can always roll your own.