What's one obvious and defining difference between the coding for a static HTML site and a Wordpress site? I'm looking for the thing that would simply define it for the casual observer. I want to be able to open a person's site - look at the code and say, "See, right here you have .... , which means your site is a Wordpress blog."
Overall, wordpress is written in PHP with HTML. You can add HTML or just plain text and images. There are also numerous plug-ins to provide almost any function from flash to java. It has an excellent backend that only takes a short time to learn. You don't have to be held hostage by a programmer in general. A wordpress blog would have a backend login where most sites are edited by ftp.
Some things that might give a website away as a wordpress or blog site might be: 1. "Categories" 2 Tags 3 Dates on posts 4 Comments 5 Recent Posts There are numerous other things... But these things are generally dynamic information that cannot be displayed without some kind of dynamic/php backend like wordpress
Check out that web source ( ctrl+ u), look for this typical stylesheet links <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://webdomain.com/wp-content/themes/theme-name/style.css" type="text/css" /> Code (markup): note : webdomain.com is that website domain and theme-name could be anything, but if its wordpress they'll have the same structure ( especially note that folder wp-content/themes/ will be there )