It’s no secret that here at StatenWeb we are big proponents of WordPress on most of our sites.

Why WordPress?

Mainly because we find WordPress is entirely customizable to meet any and all of our clients needs. Another major factor in its use is that it’s native backend (Where you make your site changes) is an extremely intuitive CMS (Content Management System). This is important because we want to provide our clients with a way to manage their site’s content with little trouble.

The purpose of this post is to clarify one major thing WordPress.org should not be confused with WordPress.com. Although they may appear the same – they aren’t. WordPress.org is where you host your own installation of WordPress software. You can use any plugins you wish, paid or free and any themes that you want, paid or free. The limits are endless.

WordPress.com is a service that provides its users with the WordPress CMS, but hosted through WordPress.com. It is relatively easy to set up, but there are a few major caveats to using this option.

Using WordPress.com you are limited in what you can create. You are limited to less than 20 of the 50,000+ plugins available to WordPress, including those created by StatenWeb (shameless plug 🙂 ). Plugins are the lifeline of WordPress. They add functionality and allow you to customize your site with data and information.
There is very limited customization in the way of themes. You can only use roughly 300 themes provided by WordPress (versus tens of thousands available to WordPress.org) You can get some (but not much) customization for a yearly fee. This is huge because no two people will have the same needs and if you go with one of the narrow number of available themes for WordPress.com you risk having a cookie-cutter looking site.
The free version gives you a *.wordpress.com domain, e.g. http://mysite.wordpress.com. You can use your own domain, e.g. http://mysite.com for a small price.

This point brings us to the power of customization. When using the WordPress.org (CMS) you are able to build, create and have COMPLETE control of what goes into your website. If there is a problem or a specific feature you want it allows a developer to write the code to build it.

At StatenWeb we live and breathe web development. We have been developing with WordPress since 2005 and have a deep understanding of how to bend it to our will. Contact us today and we can help you achieve your online goals.