WordPress.com: Deciding Where to Blog 3

by Brad Aldrich – One Flesh Marriage

Finding the best platform for all of your hard work launching a marriage blog is an important decision. In the 3rd edition of “Deciding Where to Blog” we’ll talk about WordPress and dive into the world of WordPress.com.

The WordPress’

WordPress is the largest and most popular blogging platform. 48% of the top 100 blogs use WordPress. 70% of CMBA members use one of the forms of WordPress. It is popular for a reason, it’s good!

However, even if you decided to go with WordPress you still have two decisions: WordPress.com or WordPress.org. While both of these annoyingly similar names are based on the same system they actually have quite significant differences. In this post we will take a look at the very popular, free WordPress.com. I’ll tackle .org in part 4.

WordPress.Com

WordPress.Com is an easy to use, easy to set up, free version of WordPress. There are an impressive number of free design choices, called themes, that help you define your own look and style for your blog (over 190 at the time of this writing). Within these themes you will find not only color selection, but many different ways to arrange and display your content. WordPress brags that it takes 5 minutes to set up a site. Technically this is probably true, but you will probably spend quite a bit of time choosing and tweaking before you are completely satisfied.

WordPress has a great community of people to offer support, and hopefully answer questions should problems arise. Finally, if you are ready to make the leap to self-hosted WordPress makes it much easier. Totally painless? No, but easier none the less.

Several CMBA members have made great sites using WordPress.com. Mission:Wife , Mission: Husband, and Sexy Christian Wife are all excellent examples of what you could create with WordPress.com

The .com version is not without its issues. There are limits the number of features that you can use, they provide many of the standard features most bloggers look for (social media integration, comment systems, statistics, spam assistance…) but many extras called plug-ins are not available on the .com accounts. WordPress.com also reserves the right to put advertisements on your site. In a world where we see ads everywhere we look this might not seem significant, but it can be annoying to see them pop up where you didn’t put them!

For an additional fee WordPress.com will allow you to use “premium services”. These additions, such as additional storage, or more design flexibility, and no advertisements are great but the additional monthly fees will quickly exceed the cost of running a self-hosted blog, which includes all of those services.