Why Use WordPress?
Whether you're looking to use it for your small business's main website or as a blog, there are a couple of reasons to consider using WordPress. WordPress is a free and open-source blogging and content-management system being used by more than 18% of the world's top 10 million websites. It's a favorite amongst beginners and experts alike for various reasons: it's free, customizable, powerful, and easy to master.
WordPress makes sense for small businesses because you don't need web design or programming experience at all. Pretty much anyone can create a website on WordPress; however, there are a lot of options and roads you can take.
Before You Begin: Everything You Need to Know
WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
The first thing you need to know about WordPress is that you have two options:WordPress.org and WordPress.com. WordPress.com is more for beginners since the platform hosts the blog for you, gives you analytics right on the service, and is pretty hands-off overall. You sign up, you get a yourbusinessname.wordpress.com URL, free themes, and you can get started right away. WordPress.org, on the other hand, is for the more seasoned blogger who needs full power to tweak and customize every aspect of the site from media to HTML. WordPress.org does not host your site for you, they only give you the software to build and run your site. If you want to use WordPress.org, you need to sign up (and pay for) a web-hosting service like BlueHost or HostGator. You can find out more about the differences between these to on their official page.
WordPress.com Free vs. Premium Versions
For this blog post, we'll focus on WordPress.com (WordPress.org guide coming soon), which has two versions. Once you go to sign up, you're offered the free and Premium versions. Before you make a decision, let's walk through the differences:
- Domain name and mapping: If you choose to go with the free version and you want to use your own domain name (something like mybusinessname.com instead of mybusinessname.wordpress.com), you will have to purchase domain mapping on WordPress. Once you've purchased the domain name on a registrar like GoDaddy.com orNamecheap.com, WordPress (free version) will charge you #13 to use it on your blog. On Premium, WordPress does this automatically and you can also purchase the domain right when you sign up.
- 10GB Space Upgrade: All WordPress blogs come with 3GB of space for files and images. With Premium, you get 10GB extra plus the ability to upload audio files.
- No Ads: This one is very important. WordPress.com blogs will have banner ads on them. It's the trade-off you get for not paying for the Premium version. It's not a huge deal, though. You won't have ads 100% of the time and they're not that big, but if you care about having a small to medium-sized banner ad at the bottom of a post, then consider Premium or WordPress.org.
- Custom Design: With Premium, you can change your fonts in your theme, color schemes, and CSS. Pretty much, you have more ability to control your esthetics. If you're looking to have 100% control of things like this, then skip Premium and go for WordPress.org.
- VideoPress: Simple: do you want HD video on your blog or not?
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