7 practical reasons I love WordPress.com for blogging

WordPress.com has always inspired me for blogging, I guess that will be partly because it was the first platform that I blogged on, and even though I have tried my hand at a few others I always came back to it.

From my experience though WordPress.com has 7 key features that have inspired me to stay with it and develop a few blogs and websites without being too technical or artistic.

So here are my thoughts on the 7 reasons I love WordPress.com for blogging.

1. Be artistic easily with themes

Hundreds of free themes means that you can always find yourself something that suits. As your blog develops you can choose different themes with alternative options to suit your needs. If you need them premium themes offer extended functionality for you to make use of, and they are relatively inexpensive.

The themes are flexible also, so this month I changed my theme to Intuit Types away from Twenty Ten which I had started with, as I felt like a new look. I found it so easy to change that my plan is to change the theme regularly as I feel that it keeps the blog feeling fresh.

Widgets that are built-in to the Theme you choose enable lots of extra functionality such as the addition of links, images, blog rolls, RSS feeds, photo gallery’s, Twitter feeds and so much more.

2. Publish yourself in a few simple steps

I have always found WordPress.com easy and believe that if you can edit a word document then you can edit a blog. Drag and Drop for inserting images and simple controls for your text, wrapping quotations, inserting images and to make links to other pages are all easy to master.

I believe anyone of any age could master the few simple things needed to get started, and then learn as you need to for additional items such as embedding videos etc.. The support forums on WordPress.com are also very useful in times of trouble and there is a whole community of WordPress bloggers describing tips and tricks.

The additional help from the spell checker is something I find very useful indeed, and its is a cinch to draft posts and save them for publishing later or even to complete them and schedule them to be published when you choose.

3. A worldwide community

Built in to the WordPress platform is the Email Subscription option which enables anyone to subscribe to your updates by email. When you get the engagement from your readers WordPress also manages the comments from anyone. Akismet is all part of the platform and handles the spam comments for free, which is invaluable.

In addition the built-in “Like” button and a range of Social Media sharing buttons enable readers to share your writing in an easy way. These items are all very easy to configure in the WordPress Dashboard, and you can also automatically share your posts to your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook profiles and pages.

The community of bloggers on WordPress.com are there to support you whilst they also develop their own writing. Well that is how it feels to me anyway.

4.Mobile Apps

WordPress.com understand who important it is to be able to publish from a mobile device and so there are apps available for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

I have started to use the iPhone app more in recent times and it is amazing what you can write whilst waiting in the hair-dressers for instance The apps are also a great way of recording a draft article which can be polished off before publishing. With the mobile apps it is easy to add links and photos to your posts, so being able to take a photo and then write and article immediately is useful.

5. Categories and Tags

The categories and tags offered within the WordPress help me keep my blog articles focussed and also enable them to be found for the relevant content they are written to provide. Within WordPress itself articles appear in searchable tags very quickly so readers in the WordPress community will see those articles within a short period of time.

Categories mean that people can quickly jump to relevant content on the blog, I prefer fewer categories and have only one per blog article.

6. Free or with economical upgrades

It is simple just to set up your free blog, just land on WordpRess.com and sign up and then off you go! Simple as that. I chose to have a personal domain name which costs me around $10 a year to maintain and it was very simple to get that domain to work with my existing free WordPress.com blog. I followed the basic instructions and it was all working in 24 hours. WordPress charge around $17 a year for this service – so the cost of my blog with its own domain is under $30 a year.

Any person or business could have their own website or blog at this annual cost, and I believe it offers superb value for any organisation to communicate its message to its audience. There are of course a range of Premium Add-ons, but these are themselves cost-effective, and only really needed after you are really getting heavy traffic.

7. Stats

The integrated reporting within WordPress is perfectly suitable for many blogs and websites and provides enough information for you to know what engagement you are getting from your readers – if that matters; personally for me it is irrelevant for this blog. If you want more detailed analysis then you can easily integrate Google Analytics with your blog, and still access the WordPress stats.

In Conclusion

If you have ever wanted to try some blogging or you need a simple and effective website for your business or organisation, remember to head over to WordPress.com and sign up for free and give it a go. Enjoy

Images from WordPress.com