Very Basic Wordpress Question

[KathleenMN]

People keep saying that wordpress is free. But if I have more than 2 websites, then I have to pay for it correct? Or is there something I'm missing?

[Engage]

I'm interested in this too, will welcome replies.

[angienewton]

Wordpress.com is free but I am not familiar with it.

Worpress.org is the one that is self hosted and you would need a hosting provider like Hostgator where you pay a monthly fee for unlimited domains and you can set up as many Wordpress sites as you want.

[russell]

not sure, but I know you can use as many email addresses as you want, and therefore create many free accounts

[TerriB]

Wordpress.com is free but very limited in what is available for enhancing your blog. You can't use plugins which is the best part of WordPress (in my opinion) :)

And some of the themes are limited.

If you can, try to do the WordPress.org, self-hosted. You'll be happier in the long run. And as Angie said, you can have as many as you want.

I think I have about 10 on my host currently and growing daily.

Terri

[Engage]

Wordpress.com is free but very limited in what is available for enhancing your blog. You can't use plugins which is the best part of WordPress (in my opinion) :)

What plugins do you find important?


And some of the themes are limited.

Themes are the graphic designs, right?


If you can, try to do the WordPress.org, self-hosted. You'll be happier in the long run.

How do you get support?

[marksierra]

People keep saying that wordpress is free. But if I have more than 2 websites, then I have to pay for it correct? Or is there something I'm missing?

I may be mistaken but it sounds like you're talking about the constraints by your hosting provider, right? If so, then it has nothing to do with WordPress. Whether you have one site or 100 of them, WordPress (the self-hosted kind) will be free. It's just a matter of how much your host is going to charge you for multiple domains.

[KathleenMN]

I figured out where my confusion is coming from. I am confusing Wordpress Direct with Wordpress. I guess I don't really understand the difference between the two.

[marksierra]

I don't think I've heard of WP Direct before. I guess it all comes down to how much you want to do yourself regarding putting up your sites and how much you want to pay to have it (or at least some of it) done for you.

Personally, I think you should start with self-hosting your own blogs and then determine if it's something you want to pay for. Hope this helps. :)

[StephenT]

Kathleen, I know very little about Direct other than it is pushed in Ed Dale's 30 day challenge. What I do know about Wrdpress.org is that anybody who is anybody in this businees goes with Self hosted Wordpress. You have to have a domain name and a host like hostgator or bluehost. With Wordpress.org, you can do just about anything!

[angienewton]

Hmm I have never heard of Wordpress Direct so I'm not sure what that is.

You can just sign up for hosting (Lynn uses Hostgator (http://www.clicknewz.com/hostgator.htm) as do many of us) and from the cpanel (back end) you would set up your Wordpress blog or as many as you want.

[Engage]

With Wordpress.org, you can do just about anything!

For some people, experienced users, this ability to do just about anything can be a big bonus.

For other people, perhaps most webmasters, this ability to do just about anything can be confusing, and a big distraction.

An example...

Wordpress does a great job of allowing users to choose from a wide variety of graphic designs. Users can indulge their search for the perfect look to a near endless degree.

One little fact to keep in mind...

Nobody cares about our site design, except us.

In a real sense, Wordpress in inviting it's income oriented users in to an activity that wastes their time, and thus subtracts from their bottom line.

This same principle can be applied to many of the other quite impressive Wordpress features.

All readers and prospective buyers care about is "What's In It For Me?", and this is a question only our content can answer.

[KathleenMN]

Kathleen, I know very little about Direct other than it is pushed in Ed Dale's 30 day challenge.

This is exactly where I learned what I know about Wordpress, and my lack of knowledge led to my confusion. I didn't understand that they weren't the same thing. This is not clearly stated in the challenge, I suppose because they want people to use the paid service.

I now have cleared this up in my own head. I have hostgator for my hosting and went through some tutorials on how to install wordpress through there so I will try that for my next site.

For the 2 that I am currently running through Wordpress Direct I think I will just leave there as you can have 2 for free and that is what I'm familiar with.

Thanks for all the help again everyone. I have no idea what I'd do if I didn't have this community to ask all my newbie questions to.

Kathleen

[DebraLloyd]

WordPressDirect.com is a business trading on the name. They provide hosting services and therefore charge for hosting per site - maybe the first is free I am not sure.

WordPress.org is where you will find the original open source [FREE] platform. It is very easy to use with many plugins to add bells and whistles to your site or blog.

The script for WordPress is open source and can be downloaded at www.wordpress.org or you can often DL directly from your cpanel if you already have hsoting service. There are many good hosting options - I think Lynn recommends Hostgator which is excellent I use Hostmonster just because I am used to their interface and like their live chat help. They cost about $70 for 12 months hosting you can DL WordPress and get started in minutes. GoDaddy is not good for hosting they have some weird terms of service that can come back and bite you.

FREE and Premium themes can be found in any number of places I like www.themeforest.com for nice looking cost effective options. If you have a little more money to invest try www.solostream.com.

Hosting anything on Wordpress.org/yourwebsitehere is not good for SEO as it is not indexed because it's a subdomain of wordpress.org. Via the dashboard you can set up your site and have it not viewable to the public until you are ready to publish but it will get you a head start on getting pages crawled and indexed by the SE spiders.

Let me know if you have any other WP questions I have a few sites running on it.
One last thought - I am a website broker and if you ever come to sell your site it needs to be a direct URL meaning yoursiteorblogname.com to get highest possible value.

[DebraLloyd]

Let me know if you need anything else - I also have a list of my favorite WordPress plugins - just email me.

[AlexNewell]

Wordpress Direct is a service which you can join free but then if you like what they do - like autoposting content on your blog for you, then you pay for upgrades.

[Desdichata]

Wordpress is basically a blogging platform. You can get a free blog at Wordpress.com but there is little you can do with it. You can buy an upgrade but you would be better off hosting it yourself. There 1000's of free theme and plugins to compliment Wordpress.

Engage: The themes are the design. You simply upload the theme you want to use and the navigation and structure and design of your site is done. The beauty of Wordpress is that automatically builds the links. As for plugins two of the better ones are All In One SEO Pack and Google Site Map.

Juts looking at Wordpress Direct and it appears to be a service that will add RSS feeds and PLR articles to your site automatically. The last tutorial they list would appear to be a good reason to avoid this service. Tutorial Video 9 will show you how to ‘own’ other people’s content in the search engines just by publishing it with eZine poster.

[msliz]

Kathleen,

Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org are both free.

The difference is Wordpress.com is similar to blogger.com in that it's a remote blogging platform that you simply sign up and follow the instructions to create a blog, however you will have a domain name they give you and it will look something like www.yourname.blogger.com.

With Wordpress.org the software is still free for as many blogs as you want to create but you will need to purchase your own domain name and host it on your own hosting service. So even though the blogging software is free you have to pay for your domain name and hosting service.

Does that help or did I confuse you more? :-)

[cadehugue]

i am too not sure about it as i also have only 2 websites on it.. and till 2 it didn't charged me a single penny.