Too, with the free hosting at wordpress.com, you only get to choose from a limited amount of themes, or layouts. There is an option where you can buy your own domain, and you can buy storage and several other features.  But I don’t think you get the service you’d get at goDaddy.com.  Plus they nickel and dime you to death, and I’m not sure if the service provided is as quality.

There’s also the matter of signing up as a user.  I can see how having a community like WordPress.com would be beneficial, because your blogs would be searchable with the right tags, and they advertise the most popular blogs. But I’ve heard of people having trouble with their passwords at wordpress.com. The independent WordPress sites–apart from the community of WordPress.com–have the tag feature which helps with not only visitors finding the articles or posts that they like, but also helps with the Google search engine.

Personally I like installing my own WordPress software so I can have better control over its features.  And don’t forget, by installing WordPress through goDaddy.com, you get goDaddy’s excellent customer support–not to mention my help, too!

The main difference between WordPress and other blogging softward is that you can make static pages that will always be on the horizontal bar or sidebar for easy reference. For instance, you can have a catalog of all your books on one page, which is nice for people to refer to–and you can update that page to keep it current. You can also have a bio or about me page, which tells of your background, which won’t change that much. It will be there mainly for newbies, those who are just learning about you.

I always like to have a page set up for people to contact me privately, whether I have my author hat on, or my web designer hat on, (well, I especially need a contact page for the latter!).

But the main reason I have now resorted to WordPress is because of the ease of using the admin panel, or what WordPress calls the dashboard.  Think of driving a car; everything you need to operate the vehicle is on the dashboard, which is where I think the developers of WordPress came up with the term.  It takes a little getting used to, but they have improved it so much over the years.

And I like WordPress because they have a dashboard widget that queries Google Blog Search so that when another blog links to your site it will show up here. And hey, if you link to my site, I’ll link to yours!

WordPress is evolving all the time, and I plan to keep updating Marteze tutorials for my clients.