WordPress has become the choice of many small and large based businesses since its release back in May of 2003. Over the past eight years WordPress has proven itself not only with die hard bloggers but also with companies looking for a versatile platform which can grow as their business grows. It’s estimated that WordPress has been downloaded over 33 million times, which doesn’t include all of the times people have installed it through their web hosting cPanel.
Essentially WordPress is both a blogging platform as well as a full blown website. This means it now has the functionality to provide anything from a simple blogging solution all the way through to a full blown content system or an e-commerce site.
Today people are using WordPress in a variety of ways all around the world:
- Blogs
- Full Web Sites
- News, Magazine, Business, Portfolio and Multimedia Sites
- Membership Sites
- Landing Sales Pages
- Squeeze Pages
- E-commerce
WordPress uses a combination of Posts and Pages to allow users to generate content on their site.
- Posts are displayed in chronological order and are commonly used for blog entries.
- Pages are hierarchy in nature and mainly used for static content pages. Some people prefer to build their site only using pages, while others prefer a combination of both.
There are two types of WordPress found online, Self-Hosted and Hosted:
Self-Hosted
Available from the official WordPress.org website, WordPress can be downloaded manually and made available to the public through your domain and hosting server. WordPress.org is also the main source for themes and plugins as well as support through its thriving community.
Pros:
The advantages of hosting WordPress yourself through your own paid hosting are numerous but essentially it all boils down to “control.” You have a lot more control over your content, advertising and the appearance of your site than you do if you have it hosted by WordPress.com.
- You have the ability to upload themes
- Ability to upload plugins
- Complete control over code if you want to change something
Cons:
- You have to pay for hosting
- It does require you to be a bit more technical-minded
- You have to stop spam
- You have to back up your site
- You have to upgrade the software
Hosted
The second option allows a person to have WordPress.com take care of all the hosting for them for free, very similar to blogger.com, WordPress.com provides users with a URL which looks like this: blogname.WordPress.com and then stores all their content on their server at no cost to the user.
Pros:
Certainly there are a number of benefits to having someone else take care of the technical aspects of running a WordPress site:
- It costs nothing
- It’s free and easier to setup
- Less technical as all setup, upgrades, spam management and backups are done for you
- Your site is on a high-end server so the probability of it going down is slim
- All posts are backed up
- Possibility of getting increased traffic from WordPress.com blogs of the day
Cons:
Now there are more companies running their own self-hosted version of WordPress than there are companies who have chosen to have WordPress.com take care of it, for some of the following reasons:
- Limited amount of themes
- Lack of customization due to restrictions on accessing code
- You cannot upload plugins which extend the capability of WordPress
- Branding issues
- Lack of control
- Risk of content loss
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