Best for:
- Personal bloggers
- Users who don’t plan to make money via advertisements
- Users wanting general exposure
- Users wanting a professional looking website/blog
Features:
- Publicize optionally instantly shares on social media. It can even go to facebook pages.
- Reader statistic.
- Comes with mobile versions of your blog/site.
- Multilingual.
- Akismet installed so no worries about spam.
- Can invite other users to contribute to the blog.
- If you host your own WordPress blog you can connect to WordPress.com and use the stats/follow features.
- Many more…
The Good:
WordPress has always had a great community. Hosting on WordPress.com will allow your website or blog to have instant exposure to other users. This is great if you are hosting a site for a business. Users can easily follow your blog and get quick updates when a new post is made. Finding blogs is also easy as users can search by interests.
WordPress has a database of beautiful themes that can be customized to your needs. The best part is, all themes are checked for malicious code before added to their system. There are equal parts free and pay themes. So even if you don’t want to pay for their premium services, you can still buy a nice theme.
If you’re used to hosting WordPress yourself you will find that there are no plugins. That’s because WordPress.com already has the best built in. This ensures that their site, and your blog, is kept safe.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of making your site stand out in a search engine. WordPress has great SEO practices. The rest is really up to you as far as writing great posts ans taking advantage of good titles and post content.
You start with 3Gigs of media storage which isn’t bad at all. There is the option to upgrade for small fees. Or, you could always just host on flickr or photobucket.
The Bad:
While they do offer a lot of themes you cannot use your own, one you’ve found on the internet, or even one you’ve purchased somewhere else. You are limited to the one’s they’ve chosen. If you pay for premium you do have the opportunity to suggest a theme to be added to the list, but it may not be approved.
No advertising! If you like to blog to share knowledge or resources then you probably like to at least make some advertising money. Well, you can’t really do that on WordPress.com. I get why they don’t allow it with the massive amount of annoying ads and some potentially dangerous. There is a potential for making money on ads, but it requires spending money. Read below.
Optional Pay Features:
Up until recently it was not possible to put ads on your blog. There is a catch. You have to pay the $17 a year for a custom domain, then request an invite for WordAds.
- $30 will unlock more customization tools for ALL themes.
- $50+ will buy you a premium theme.
- $99 gets you a premium
- View more on http://store.wordpress.com
-
- Theme preview
