Wordpress Review

Clarification:  There are two ways to use Wordpress.  One is through their free hosting platform at Wordpress.com.  The other is to install their software on your own hosting, which is generally referred to as Wordpress.org.  There are some limitations with what you can do at free hosted Wordpress.com, which we’ll go through below.  On the other hand, by installing their software on your own hosted account (most hosts have one-click installation), you can do pretty much anything you can imagine with Wordpress.

So why would I consider Wordpress.com, a free blogging platform, to be free web hosting? Simple. Because it is.

More than just “blogging” is capable with the Wordpress software, which can handle anything from blogs to complex ecommerce sites and social networks. To be certain, there are some things you can’t do with free hosting at Wordpress.com that you can do if you take the software and put it into your own, self-hosted site. But if you are looking for “free,” then you can’t be all that picky, can you? There are severe drawbacks to every free hosting package out there, but Wordpress.com is different. It was meant to be free all along.

What you can do

Blog: Might as well start with the obvious.  Free blogging is what Wordpress.com was designed for, and for that it is fantastic.  If you simply have a strong desire to express yourself, you can’t do any better than to go with a free Wordpress.com account.  They have a copious collection of templates to use, so that you can set your blog up just about any way you imagine.  Your blog will probably be picked up rather quickly by Google, and you will also get traffic internally via Wordpress.com’s great methods of distributing traffic.  Not only can people search all free Wordpress.com blogs, but your articles may show up under on other people’s blogs as “possibly related posts.”

Marketing: Wordpress.com is a great way to market other sites you may have.  They are rather particular in what you can attempt to sell there.  You can’t use javascript, and you can’t push things like “get rich quick” schemes, but legitimate businesses may use the free blog to update their customers and advertise their products.  You can even run honest affiliate programs from Wordpress.com.

What you can’t do

Wordpress.com wants to run an honest blogging/website system.  Certain things are against the rules there, like running link farms and advertising suspect products.  If you are looking for somewhere to push your off-shore gambling and pharmacy business, you have come to the wrong spot.  Also, you can’t run scripting or things like Adsense.

Bottom Line: Looking for a handy place to host an honest site with some decent design flexibility for free?  Wordpress.com may just be for you.  It’s a great starting place, and the flexibility of the free themes is pretty dramatic.  Know a little about HTML and you can pretty much put up any type of you can imagine by setting it for a particular page to come up first, rather than your blogging entries.

If all you want to do is blog, free Wordpress.com is a great spot.  Even if you are just unsure of what you want to do, Wordpress.com may be a great place to experiment and get your start.