What is WordPress?

If you are considering building a website that you — as a non-tech — can manage, maintain and manipulate, there are several blogging/content management systems available.

After checking out a few, I quickly settled on WordPress for its ease of use, professional appearance, and the multitude of online support forums and sites. Not to mention all the cool plugins that add almost any type of feature you can think of. It as been around since 2001, and now accounts for 25% of all websites on the globe!

From the WordPress.com site:

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, whose software is available for free at WordPress.org.

WordPress.com or WordPress.org

First, let’s define both .COM and .ORG.

.COM — is a for-profit hosted blogging service run by Automattic. Your WP site can be hosted on wordpress.com for free, however your domain will be called something similar to acme@wordpress.com. You do not own your domain or site.

.ORG — is software that you download and install on your site. Users create their own WordPress site on their own web server using their own domain name. WordPress theme and plugin repositories are found on WordPress.ORG

There is a great table that compares both .COM and .ORG. You can see it here.