Summary. Those seeking a professional, secure, inexpensive, and easy to manage website can probably look no further than WordPress.com where you can get started with a new website in minutes.
WordPress.org is the website for those seeking to choose their own website host and independently use the free WordPress software for website management. Using WordPress independently offers greater customization but costs more and it’s necessary to do your own updates to the software and take measures to secure your site. An impressive list of clients have chosen WordPress.org software to manage their independent websites such as Boston University, Herman Miller, Kobe Bryant, Old Spice, Staples (Canada), TED, The Economist (Chinese Edition), and Wheaton College.
Benefits of WordPress.com Hosting. When using WordPress.com the site hosting and management are taken care of automatically, and free. This is why over 250,000 websites are hosted by WordPress.com with varying degrees of customization.
Getting Started. Here are the steps required to get started using WordPress.com for your website.
- If you want to have a personalized website with your own domain name, register a domain name with WordPress.com (about $15 per year) or through a company like Network Solutions (about $35 per year). Otherwise, a free WordPress.com site has an address such as http://yourwebsite.wordpress.com (for example).
- Create some basic pages such as home, articles, contact, and about.
- Start writing some articles for your website.
- From your WordPress website Dashboard, under Settings > Reading, you can set the Home page to be the Front Page Display for your site. Otherwise, site visitors are presented with the latest articles you’ve written. Also, set the Articles page to display the running directory of yoru latest blog articles.
That’s all you need to do to setup a secure, professional, and inexpensive website.
WordPress.com – Websites made simple.