Wikipedia describes Wordpress.com as:

‘WordPress.com is a WordPress-powered weblog hosting provider which opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account. It is financially supported via the use of Google Adsense banners and paid upgrades.

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser^[1]. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 2,491,431 individual blogs with the service^[2]. Registration is not required to read or comment on weblogs hosted on the site, except if the blog owner wanted to do so; but registration is required to own or post in a weblog. All the basic and original features (current as of May 2006) of the site are free-to-use, and will remain so in future. However, some features (such as a CSS editor, domain mapping, and storage upgrades) are available only to users who pay for them^[3]‘

If you were coming to blogging fresh and inexperienced this definition would be as clear as mud. And this is the problem: Wordpress blogging is so immersed in incomprehensible jargon that a newbie balks at the first hurdle.

So let’s do what the marketers tell us to do: point out the benefits, NOT the features.

What are the benefits? It’s quite simple.

• Wordpress lets you create a free, robust, flexible web presence without the need to know any webpage coding language.
• Wordpress is a WYSIWYG blogging system that lets you create web pages quickly, easily and as often as you like
• Wordpress is respected as the premier blogging platform on the Internet.

That’s it. That’s what Wordpress is.