WordPress.com VS WordPress.org

As part of the setup for the new Greening the Inner-city blog I’m helping some folks get up and running. I’ve been asked a lot of questions about WordPress, specifically what differentiates it from Blogger, Drupal, self hosting, plugins, the importance of well chosen categories, the rise of tags… etc. etc.

Blogging, at least blogging well, is a lot of work, that is one reason people are able to make a living off it, either as a blogger or as a consultant. It is really just better software and standards than what was available when Tim Berners Lee came up with the homepage. Blogs vary from journals, to online magazines, to being portions of a larger site or marketing/PR effort. There were a lot of Drupal folks likely at Bootup Labs last night, but Invoke Media was there, they do a lot of work in WordPress. The two can co-exist, but if all you want to do is blog, go with WordPress, and if you don’t need to be part of some online clique, and don’t have the technical skills or the time to setup a self hosted blog, go with WordPress.com, it is easy, free, and for most people more than they need. My sister eventually set up a blog using the WordPress.com rather than paying to self-host.

WordPress Has Come a Long Way

Here are some stats about WordPress, and here are some more facts about popular websites. See how WordPress became the world’s most popular blogging platform, at least in the English speaking world.

In 2019 I am still using WordPress and still trying to leverage this blog in my never ending post-MBA job search.

Advantages of WordPress

There are numerous advantages of using WordPress. Many of them such as standards compliant you get regardless of whether you self-host or use WordPress.com. However, if you self-host like I do you can have greater control over your theme, your plugins, which really affects how your blog looks and even how your blog performs in search engines.

WordPress can perform quite well in search engines if you focus, stick to an intelligent taxonomy and don’t do anything spammy. If you self-host you can use plugins to help with your SEO efforts such as the one created by Yoast. I started using it in 2019 and actually had to revise and edit hundreds of posts to try to take even greater advantage of it and the underlying structured metadata which is ever more important online.

Social media also plays a bigger role in search engine optimization. You don’t need to be on every online social network, but you can definitely increase traffic to your website by leveraging Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, even LinkedIn. I actually removed the social sharing buttons from my blog to make it run faster especially in China, but many blogs rely heavily on social media. I actually get most of my referrals from Google particularly image search.

If you have questions or advice about the advantages of WordPress you can leave them below.

This entry was originaly posted on April 23rd, 2009, it was last edited on February 16th, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, WordPress.