WordPress.com

1. WordPress.com Free Blogging Site

2. The Features You’ll Love • Takes seconds, costs nada • You can get a blog started in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. All you need is an email address. • What you’ll get: • Your own WordPress.com address (like you.wordpress.com, you can switch to a custom address later if you’d like), • a selection of great free and customizable designs for your blog (we call them themes), • 3 gigabytes of file storage (that’s about 2,500 pictures!) and all the other great features listed here. • You can blog as much as you want for free, your blog can be public to the world or private for just your friends, and our premium features are completely optional.

3. Over a hundred gorgeous themes • You can change the look of your blog with over 100 hundred attractive themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button. • Each theme allows you to customize your sidebar using widgets, and several themes let you upload your own photo or image for the header bar. We add themes regularly based on user requests.

4. Integrated stats system • One of our most popular features is our stats system. It’s designed to give you up-to-the-minute stats on how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, which posts are most popular, and which search engine terms are sending people to your blog.

5. A great tool for writing • It’s easy to create great posts with WordPress.com. Uploading photos is easy, as is using services like Flickr or Photobucket. You can embed videos from YouTube or Hulu. And we know how frustrating it is to lose hours of work, so when you’re writing we continuously save your post, just in case.

6. Let’s get those 15 minutes • When you write a post and add relevant tags, we automatically add them to our global tag system and tag surfer, driving new traffic as other people interested in the same topics as you will find your post and leave comments on your blog. You’ll be at the top of our Blogs of the Day in no time.

7. We kill spam dead • WordPress.com uses Akismet, the world’s best comment and trackback spam technology. It blocks spammers from leaving comments on your blog. We also shut down spam blogs that try to sneak onto WordPress.com (so your blog won’t be in the same community as some Viagra-touting site).

8. Great help if you need it • If you have questions about using or extending your blog, we’ve got some of the most responsive support around. We’ve got friendly fellow users in the forums and on our support team who will help you out. There is great documentation, a support contact form, and the forums are active 24 hours a day.

9. Like a rock • We run hundreds of servers in three datacenters (Chicago, Dallas, San Antonio) with instant copies of all your data and uploads in each. This allows us to serve your blog very quickly, and also if something catastrophic were to happen, like Chicago falling into Lake Michigan or Dallas being hit by a meteor, your blog would be okay.

10. You’re in good company • You’d be surprised who’s blogging on WordPress.com. We host CNN’s Political Ticker; Dow Jones’ AllThingsD; NFL; Time Inc’s The Page; People Magazine’s Style Watch; famous bloggers like Mark Cuban, John Scalzi, and Joy Behar; corporate blogs for Flickr and KROQ; and many more.

11. Pick up where you left off • If you already have a blog and would like to move it over to WordPress.com, you can import your content from Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, or an existing WordPress blog.

12. Over 50 languages • So far, we’ve been able to offer native versions of WordPress.com in over 50 languages. Not just our home page—we’re doing Blogs of the Day, forums, and even tags in whatever language you prefer. If you’re a polyglot, you can help with the community translation process.

13. A great blogging community • WordPress.com is a community and conversations continue from one blog post to another and through the comments. Our tag surfer feature makes it easy for you to find like minded bloggers interested in the same topics as you and connect with them.

14. Multiple blogs and multiple authors • You can have as many blogs as you want! You’re only limited by your imagination. You can have group blogs with multiple authors who are allowed to post or contribute. This is great for topic blogs for things like books or politics, or just a blog for you and your friends in one place.

15. Privacy options, including members-only blogs • WordPress.com allows you to have a completely public blog, a blog which is public but not included in search engines or our public listings, or a private blog which only members can access. If you want a public blog, but only occasionally post something private, we have a per-post password option too!

16. Sidebar widgets for Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, and more • You can add “widgets” to your sidebar and rearrange them without touching any HTML code or messing up your blog. Just drag and drop the sidebar widgets around, and instantly you can have fun stuff in your sidebar. We’re adding new widgets all the time based on your feedback and requests.

17. Track replies to your comments • When you’re signed in and leave a comment on WordPress.com, we have a special page which notifies you of any followups to your comment so you can easily follow your conversations no matter what blog they’re on.

18. Not just a blog • WordPress.com has a feature called “pages” which allows you to easily create web pages. For example, you could add an “about me” page with your biography, and a link to that page would be automatically added to your sidebar. You can even create an entire web site using pages on WordPress.com, with a custom home page and your blog as one of the sub-pages.

19. No lock-in • You can leave WordPress.com any time you want and your content isn’t locked in. We provide a complete XML export of all your posts and comments.

20. Accepted Filetypes • Currently, you are permitted to upload the following file types to your WordPress.com blog (no upgrade required): • Images.jpg.jpeg.png.gif

21. Documents.pdf (Portable Document Format; Adobe Acrobat).doc, .docx (Microsoft Word Document).ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx (Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation).odt (OpenDocument Text Document).xls, .xlsx (Microsoft Excel Document)

22. Audio • With the purchase of a Space Upgrade you are also permitted to upload the following audio file types, in addition to the basic file types listed above: • .mp3.m4a.ogg.wav • There is an embedded audio player built in to WordPress.com that will work with .mp3 files.

23. Video • With the purchase of the VideoPress you are permitted to upload the following video file types, in addition to the basic file types listed above.  Note that purchasing VideoPress will not enable you to also upload audio files. If you wish to upload audio files, you need the Space Upgrade, as well. • .mp4, .m4v (MPEG-4).mov (QuickTime).wmv (Windows Media Video).avi.mpg.ogv (Ogg).3gp (3GPP).3g2 (3GPP2)

24. Google Calendar • Google Calendar is a free calendar application from Google. You can embed a calendar into your WordPress.com blog by copying and pasting the embed code.

25. On Your Mobile • If you have one of the following mobile devices, you can download an app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog directly from your device. • WordPress for iOS (iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch) – FAQ, Forums • WordPress for Blackberry – FAQ, Forums • WordPress for Android – FAQ, Forums • WordPress for Nokia • WordPress for Windows Phone7, Forums • If you don’t have one of the mobile devices listed above, don’t worry – you can still use m.wordpress.com – a mobile version of your dashboard that lets you easily publish new blog posts, view stats and add new links to your blogroll. Simply point your mobile browser to http://m.wordpress.com to get started!

26. Security • Your sites are well-protected on WordPress.com. We monitor potentially harmful activity to ensure there is no unauthorized access to your content. To help keep your sites secure there are a few things you can do to protect your data.

27. Keeping your secrets secret • The weakest link in the security of anything you do online is your password. It’s the key to your blog, your email, your social networking accounts or any other online service you use. If your password is easy to guess, your online identity is vulnerable. • Logging out to prevent public access to your Dashboard • You can protect your account by logging out when you are finished working. This is especially important when you are working on a shared or public computer. If you don’t log out, someone may be able to access your account just by viewing the browser history and going back to your WordPress.com Dashboard.

28. Safely sharing control of your site with other users • WordPress.com provides a rich multi-user platform. While each site has only one owner, you can have as many users as you want – this is ideal for group blogs with multiple authors, for magazine-style sites with an editorial workflow, or for any other large site where you want to share some of the administrative load. • You can set different Roles for each user you add to your site. Roles determine a user’s access level. • The most limited role, Contributor, can only write draft posts, but can’t publish them. Users with an Author role can publish posts and upload images, but can’t touch other users posts. Editors can not only edit or publish any user’s posts, they can also moderate comments and manage categories and tags. Finally, the Administrator role has full control of the site – they can even delete it.