I’ve played around with different content management systems over the last few years including Typepad, Joomla, Drupal, Indexhibit, and Wordpress. Of these five, Wordpress is my favorite and in my opinion it’s the easiest to set up, configure and administer. For most users, Wordpress offers all the functional capability that could be needed or that most users would want.
But there are two Wordpress versions: Wordpress.com and Wordpress .org. What’s the difference? Basically, Wordpress.com is free and you don’t need to do much. Wordpress.org is free and you can do anything you want. Confused? Let me explain.
WordPress.com
If you sign up for a blog at Wordpress.com, your blog is free and all you need to do is fill in a few registration details and get going. Well, it’s almost that simple and yes there is a slight learning curve. For example, you’ll probably want to pick a theme –of which there are many, to create a look and you’ll need to learn how to operate the backend for styling your content, uploading photos, videos, and adding widgets. But, you won’t have to worry about upgrades, backups, or security. The people at Wordpress.com will take care of all of that techie stuff.
This is a relatively painless route to take but the downside is that your account is ultimately benefiting the Wordpress.com domain with search visibility instead of your own. All that free content –which search engines thrive on, uploaded daily by thousands of registered site owners feeds the search engine beast, for Wordpress.com. It might be your content, but you are working SEO –search engine optimization, for Wordpress.com.
Wordpress.org
If you walk over to Wordpress.org, what will you find? Exactly the same Wordpress application. At Wordpress.org you –or your favorite technical developer, can download all the files that make up the Wordpress application to a local development environment. There it can be configured to suit individual need and then uploaded to your hosting company that services your domain. Doing this now allows you, the domain owner, to reap the search and optimization benefits that come from adding fresh content to a website, through your Wordpress blog application. And it really is yours.
Is there a downside? Not if you have technical skills optimally knowing enough about PHP, MySQL and APACHE to get around. If you do, then you’ll appreciate the freedom that comes from having full access to the code. You –or your developer, can dig into the core to see how everything works, and have full control over every aspect of the application. If you don’t have that special gene, then you will be in for a bumpy ride. Either way though, downloading the application you, and you alone, will be responsible for everything including upgrades, backups, security and figuring out what’s going on when problems arise.
Wordpress.com click here.
Wordpress.org click here.
Further reading comparing Wordpress.com with Wordpress.org.
