Building your WordPress website – start here
The first decision you have to make is where your blog is going to live. You have two basic options when creating your site:
- Do it at https://wordpress.com
- Install on a third-party web server (usually hosted by an external company)
Let's look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two options.
The advantage of using WordPress.com (https://wordpress.com/) is that they take care of all the technical details for you. The software has already been installed, and it will be upgraded for you whenever there is an upgrade available. You're not responsible for anything else but the management of your content. A major disadvantage is that you lose almost all of the theme and plugin control you'd have otherwise. The other advantages and disadvantages are as follows:
- WordPress.com will not let you upload or edit your own theme, though it will let you (for a fee) edit the CSS of the themes that are already there.
- WordPress.com will not let you upload or manage plugins at all. Some plugins are installed by default (most notably Akismet, for spam blocking, and also plugins supporting Google Sitemaps, caching, carousel slideshows, image galleries, polls, site stats, and some social media buttons), but you can neither uninstall them nor install others. Additional features are available for a fee.
In this chapter, you'll learn all the basics about working with WordPress.com (how to launch a website there and how to manage it). The subsequent chapters will all be about the self-hosted version of WordPress--the main version of WordPress, as many people would say, plus how to work with it.
A major advantage of installing WordPress on another server (which means either a server that belongs to the web host with which you signed up or a server you set up on your own computer) is that you have control over everything. You can add and edit themes, add and remove plugins, and even edit the WordPress application files yourself, if you wish to (however, don't do this unless you're confident about your WordPress skills). You'll have to keep your own WordPress software up to date, but that's relatively simple, and we'll cover it in this chapter. The only disadvantage is that you have to perform the installation and maintenance tasks on your own, which, as you'll see, shouldn't be too intimidating. Moreover, some web hosts provide a one-click or easy-to-use installer, which lets you skip over some of the nitty-gritty steps involved in the manual installation.
In this chapter, we'll discuss how to create a new blog on WordPress.com and how to start working with it on a daily basis. However, if you want to accomplish any of the more advanced tasks concerning the topics in this book, you will have to install WordPress on your own server as opposed to using WordPress.com.
The following table is a brief overview of the essential differences between using WordPress.com and downloading a package from WordPress.org and then installing it on your own server:
