What’s the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org?

Wordpress.com is a free blog platform, hosted by WordPress. You can have a totally free blog as a subdomain on their server. Your blog’s URL would be xxxxxx.wordpress.com where xxxxxx is your chosen username. The advantage is that it’s free and you have a wide choice of themes (designs) and blogging tools that you can choose from. The disadvantage is that you can’t monetize it: they don’t allow you to put Adsense on it and they can close you down if you have money-making or business links on your blog. And another downside is that you don’t own the blog - they do. They can remove your blog at will if you do something that is against their terms of service.

WordPress.org is the self-hosted version of WordPress. The software driving the blog is free but you have to pay for a domain and hosting service. This doesn’t cost megabucks and is essential if you are running any sort of business. The advantage of this is that the blog URL is your own domain that you registered. And you can pretty much do what you like on your blog: have Adsense, sell your own product(s), have affiliate links, plugins, banners, whatever you like. You own the blog - it’s your property and you could even sell it.

When you think about WordPress blogging you maybe imagine a hinterland of obsessed loners, hunched over their keyboards, typing into the night, unloved and unseen.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Let me tell you a story.

I have a friend, let’s call her Liz,  who recently did me a big favour and, when I insisted on doing something in return, she said I could teach her blogging. Now, although I immediately agreed,  I privately had my doubts. Here’s a (let’s be polite) mature lady with no great love of computers and an impatience with anything that is too technical.

She explained that she wanted to start a blog to keep her family in touch. She has four children in three countries and they have given her six grandchildren who, because of their parents’ businesses, travel frequently. She wanted each member of the family to be able to post their news and photographs and for other members of the family to comment on them. And she wanted this blog to be private: she didn’t want it indexed in the search engines, she wanted it accessible only to her family.

Fine. WordPress will let you do all of that, but I imagined a long learning curve for this total, untutored newbie . So, I printed out a copy of my free WordPress tutorial and took it round to her house.

We sat down at her computer and I guided her through the first few pages of the ebook. She did exactly what it said although she confessed total incomprehension at first. But, after we had been through the process of creating her WordPress account and selecting the theme, she began to see what was going on. With a little bit of help from me she made her ‘About’ page and she typed up and published her first post. And, we added a picture.

To my amazement, when she saw what she’d done, she immediately ‘got it’. We were soon going over to the section where you can set up authorised users and she added her sons, daughters and grandchildren.

Then, with a little bit of help from me, she emailed all her family with instructions on how to get their own WordPress accounts so that they could log in and contribute to the blog.  She instructed them all to download my tutorial and work through it. They are used, I am sure, to doing exactly what she tells them!

I left them to it. I kept in touch with her by phone and she called me a few times over the next few days to let me know how they were getting on.

The first to come on board was her son in Australia. He put up a lovely post with some pictures of his horse taken from his phone. And his young daughter added an account of how she had done in her gym class. Dad added a photo of her in her gym kit. And granny replied back with news of her old horse. And she put up another picture she had taken at Christmas of another grandchild with a face painting.

I was impressed.  But I was even more impressed the next time I went to see her and she showed me their blog on her computer. All by herself, she’d uploaded one of her photos and made it into the blog’s header! It looked totally beautiful and her family had all contributed to their unique blog, free of charge, keeping them all in touch from around the world.

Families can be together in a blog even when they are thousands of miles apart. Distance is no barrier. WordPress works for families as well as the web-geeks!

This is a true story.

As WordPress grows more popular and ever more powerful, using WordPress as a CMS is now becoming mainstream.

First of all, what is a CMS? The letters stand for ‘Content Management System’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘website’. Yes, you can make a WordPress blog look and feel like a traditional website. A WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like a blog at all.

How? Well, first of all you need to decide what you want your CMS to look like. This is no different from designing a website. On some paper, sketch out what your front page will look like, where you want your navbars and where those navbars will lead. On a traditional website the navbars will likely lead to other static pages. So, make a list of the pages you’ll need to create.

Then choose an appropriate theme. If you’re using a free theme from WordPress, choose something minimal and simple. It’s easier to add features to a theme than take them away.

The front page of your blog will probably be a static page, one that is always displayed as the landing page of your site. This page could be a hub page with links to other pages, just like a conventional website, if you like.

Many themes have tabs or buttons that navigate to pages. If you’re going to have a lot of pages it will be better to avoid a theme that has a horizontal menu of pages because you’ll likely run out of horizontal space. If you’re going to have a lot of pages put your navbar vertically down one side.

You’ll soon find that there are a lot of ways you can do this. The easiest is to use a ‘Pages’ widget. This will automatically update as you add another page. You can specify the order of pages down the list if you want. And you can organise your pages into a hierarchy by specifying parent pages.

Strip out all the bloggy looking widgets from your sidebars. But be prepared to be open to ideas because WordPress provides some very powerful and flexible ways you can harness widgets to do what you want. Categories is one example.  By applying one or more categories to a page you get an alternative and more intuitive way of navigating your blog.

And if posts and comments are not appropriate, then you don’t have to include them. Just organise your blog as a network of pages and you’ll be fine.

The great beauty of WordPress is that, as you add pages, it automatically updates menus and links. You’ll never have to worry about broken links again and your CMS will grow gracefully as you add ever more pages. That’s got to be worth it!