WordPress.com & WordPress.org

For those of you thinking of starting a blog, the blogosphere can be a bit of a minefield. There are plenty of options to choose from and one of the most popular blogging platforms is WordPress. To make things more complicated, there are two versions of WordPress! So what’s the difference?

Wordpress.com
This is WordPress’s free hosted blogging option. You can set up a blog quickly and easily, choose from a variety of free templates and get a free WordPress domain, e.g yourblog.wordpress.com. If you want a free blog without having to learn anything technical and just get on with blogging, WordPress.com is a great place to start. For some additional fees, you can have access to the stylesheet of your template so that you can customize it (ask a techie to do it for you!) and point your own domain at the blog (so that it doesn’t look like you’ve chosen the free option) and integrates it more into your own website.

WordPress.org
This is also free, but the difference is you have to host the blog yourself (it’s known as the self-hosted version). You don’t have to pay for the WordPress files, but the costs involved include hosting the site, possibly paying for a template (although there are plenty of free ones to choose from, but you may want a bespoke one designed) and you may also need to pay for some technical expertise. WordPress.org not only gives you a great blogging platform, but you can use it as a fully fledged content management system for your website. You can also do this with WordPress.com, but the self-hosted version allows much more flexibility, particularly if you want to take payments over the web. The entire site can be customized to make it look like a website rather than a blog site as you can choose static pages as your home / service pages.

This is only a brief comparison, but hopefully it’ll help you to understand the differences between the two and work out which version of WordPress is best for you!