<span data-rel="title">Day 1: The Difference Between WordPress.org and WordPress.com</span>

Resource: http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org — The official WordPress site offers a good explanation.

I remember the first time I started playing around with a free blog hosted on wordpress.com. It was great, I couldn’t believe I had a live site within minutes, and playing with different themes became kind of addictive. The trouble was, I didn’t know CSS, and I also wasn’t given the power to customize the site any more than change the placements of a couple of widgets unless I wanted to change the theme. I also noticed talk about different “plugins” that I definitely could’ve found useful, but I couldn’t install any beyond the ones that WordPress.com had approved.

Here’s the deal. If you just want to blog, my advice would be to go for the free hosting on tumblr, wordpress, or blogspot. (And if you’re so inclined, you could even attach a domain name to your blog.) But if you want to go beyond blogging and learn web design and development, then you should install the open-sourced wordpress package. In the open-sourced version you’ll actually be able to access your theme files and see the code that makes everything click. This means you’ll have to pay for a 3rd party hosting provider, but at the average price of 1-2 coffees per month and for the benefit of the learning experience, the cost is well worth it.

You should check with your hosting provider to figure out how to install WordPress. Some services, like Bluehost, let you install it with one click (it really is that easy). WordPress is a very popular CMS (content management system), so the question should be old beans for any hosting provider you’re researching.

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The Coding Diaries Front-end dev with no CS degree. My hope is for this blog to be helpful for others starting out too.

Day 1: The Difference Between WordPress.org and WordPress.com

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