Help With WordPress.com

I don’t generally recommend that people use Wordpress.com for a business site and my reasons are pretty well covered by Andy Wibbels’ overview post on the Business Blog Consulting blog -WordPress.com is not WordPress.org. He suggests it would be clearer if the WordPress you get from WordPress.com were called WordPress Lite.

And in a post on this blog earlier this year about  the lack of domain mapping with WordPress.com I indicated that, for the time being at least, I would not be recommending WordPress.com to people,. But lately I’ve found myself breaking or at least bending my own rule. That’s when someone is not ready to go with a paid, hosted service such as BlogHarbor, which is the platform for this blog, or doesn’t feel they can tackle anything that requires even a modicum of attention to technical issues, such as installing WordPress from WordPress.org.

That situation arose again today and I put together a few points on setting up with Wordpress.com, as follows:

Just to remind – the site is www.wordpress.com

What you are looking for when you get there is text on the front page which says ‘get a free account etc’ – click on that link.

Here’s a 3 step setup from blogging expert, Shai Coggins. 

Lorelle has a great Wordpress guidance type blog – http://lorelle.wordpress.com/

And here’s a useful recent comment by Lorelle - Who Cares About WordPress.com?

One of the top bloggers in the world, Robert Scoble – works for Microsoft – has his blog on wordpress.com http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/

Although you can’t yet have your own domain name on wordpress.com – I’m sure it will come eventually, for a modest price.

If anyone has a link to other resources that might help other non-technical newbies negotiate a WordPress.com setup, please feel free to leave a comment here.