WordPress.com and WordPress.org
WordPress is a publishing platform that makes it easy for anyone to publish online, and proudly powers millions of websites. It comes in two flavors: the fully hosted WordPress.com, and the self-hosted version available at WordPress.org.
| WordPress.com Focus on your beautiful content, and let us handle the rest. |
WordPress.org Get your hands dirty, and host your website yourself. |
| Premium hosting, security, and backups are included. You can even upgrade to a custom domain, like YourGroovyDomain.com. | You’ll need to find a host, and perform backups and maintenance yourself. We offer VaultPress for security and backups. |
| Choose from hundreds of beautiful themes. Make it your own with Custom Design. | Install custom themes. Build your own with PHP and CSS. |
| Integrate your site with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networks. | Install a plugin, like Jetpack, to enable sharing functionality on your site. |
| Popular features like sharing, stats, comments, and polls are included. There’s no need to install plugins. | Install plugins to extend your site’s functionality. |
| Personal support and forums are always available. | Visit the support forums for assistance. |
WordPress is a community-driven project that’s developed by and for people like you. Many thousands of people from around the world contribute to the project, and many millions of websites are powered by it. From large company websites to personal blogs, and everything in between, everyone can publish with WordPress.
There are two ways that you can get started with WordPress. You can host a WordPress installation on your own server, or you can host your site here at WordPress.com and let us handle the technical bits.
Hosting your own WordPress site can be fun and rewarding, but it also requires some technical knowledge and places more responsibility on you, the publisher. You can download the WordPress software for free at http://wordpress.org, but it must be installed on a web server before it will work. Many hosting providers offer a one-click installation of WordPress – here are a few examples. If you’re looking for a web development agency that specializes in building beautiful WordPress sites, check out the CodePoet Directory.
WordPress.com is different. Here at WordPress.com, you don’t have to download software, pay for hosting, or manage a web server. You can instead focus on creating wonderful content, and let us handle the rest!
WordPress.com is a great choice for bloggers, photographers, artists, plumbers, doctors, restaurateurs — almost anyone. However, people looking to start e-commerce sites, and techies that prefer to maintain full control over their code, should consider hosting their own WordPress installation.
Publishing your website is always free here at WordPress.com. And many excellent premium upgrades are available to help you supercharge your site. These upgrades let you use a custom domain (like YourGroovyDomain.com), extensively customize the appearance of your site, upload HD video, and lots more.
WordPress.com is a commercial enterprise owned by Automattic, a company started by the founding developer of WordPress and staffed by full-time developers, designers, and support engineers. Automatticians (employees of Automattic) regularly contribute back to the WordPress software so that the entire community can benefit.
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