WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org – Which is Right for You?

You might be thinking about starting a new website using WordPress, or migrating your existing website to this famous platform. You’ve heard about the SEO benefits and you know that plenty of major business brands take advantage of this amazing website backbone. But did you know there are two WordPress options?

WordPress.com is the for-profit business owned by Automattic that uses the WordPress.org open source codex.
WordPress.org offers the open source software managed by the non-profit WordPress Foundation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The two websites are officially separate entities, but are often confused because of the similar names and because Matt Mullenweg is the founder of both entities.

 

The Easy Explanation in Difference

 

WordPress.com: A user can easily sign up and begin customizing a basic website for a web presence in less than five minutes. There is no coding knowledge needed and it is completely free for the most basic of sites.

 

WordPress.org: The WordPress codex is open source software and is also completely free to use. Here is where you download the software which is then uploaded to your server. A user needs a hosting account or their own server, a domain name, and the ability to upload and configure the software.

 

Which Should You Use?

There are many factors affecting this decision and ultimately, that choice is yours.

A quick overview is below. Or, click on the infographic to the right for a more detailed review.

 

No budget, no coding experience: Use WordPress.com for now. You can upgrade to either a paid plan on WordPress.com or migrate to a website using the WordPress.org software later on down the road.

 

A quick online presence for an individual: Either option will work to get you up and running in just a few minutes. Setting up a website with WordPress.org is as simple as clicking a mouse, choosing layouts, and adding your content.

 

An online store: WordPress.org is your best option. Even with the highest tier of WordPress.com’s paid plans, there are limited capabilities for online stores and selling options. Building a brand and creating a unique online shopping experience truly requires customizations that are only available when you’re in control of the code.

 

Large budgets: WordPress.org will provide you with limitless applications. If you have no coding experience but a large budget, hire a website developer to install, configure, and design your new website with the WordPress codex.

 

Membership Sites: It depends on what you want your members to be able to do, but if it’s anything more than simply contributing articles, you will need to work with WordPress.org’s software.

 

Three Important Factors to Consider

 

1) Cost

 

WordPress.com offers a free plan for a basic website with very limited features and design options. But they also offer three levels of paid plans. These plans cannot be broken down into monthly payments and the yearly fee must be paid upfront.

 

WordPress.com Free Plan: Extremely limited in design and features.

WordPress.com Personal Plan: Also extremely limited but a custom domain name is included and you can remove the branding for $48 per year.

WordPress.com Premium Plan: Better design options with unlimited premium themes, more storage, the freedom to monetize, and add simple payment buttons for $96 per year.

WordPress.com Business Plan: With this plan, you have the freedom to upload and work with any custom component, but you don’t have access to the straight code. This is an excellent choice for those who are determined to do it themselves without coding experience for $300 per year.

 

WordPress.org is a great solution for keeping costs down and simultaneously creating a customized website. The layman can learn to set up a blog or website with WordPress.org easily as there exists a wealth of information and numerous guides online. The only necessary costs are that of a hosting provider, which is often less than the WordPress.com Personal Plan, and a domain name which is fairly inexpensive at an average of $15 per month total. Additional costs are incurred with expensive commercial themes, paid plugins, and developer expenses – but these are not always necessary.

 

2) Domain Name

 

Take into consideration that a domain name is not included in the WordPress.com Free Plan. Instead, you receive a subdomain of your choosing, and if available, to work with.  Your website’s address will look something like this mynewsite.wordpress.com

A subdomain doesn’t negatively affect SEO but isn’t considered as professional as your own unique domain name would be.

 

With any of WordPress.com’s paid plans, you can pick a domain name through them and switch from your subdomain to your newly acquired domain name. If you already have a domain name, you can point it to your WordPress.com website.

 

If you’ve decided to work with the WordPress codex and install it on your own server, it is your responsibility to acquire a domain name. Most hosting providers will provide domain name services. Many businesses keep their domain names and website hosting separate to avoid the loss of both properties in case of server devastation.

 

3) Support

 

WordPress.org’s downloadable software is open source and free – this means there is no formal support. There is no one to call or email or chat with if your website goes down or if you’re having problems making custom changes. There is only the community forum available.

 

With any of WordPress.com’s paid plans, you are entitled to free email and live chat support.

 

Is It Difficult to Install the WordPress.org Software?

 

If it’s something you’ve never done before and you have no coding experience, this may seem like a daunting task. But the truth is that it is exceptionally easy and I have written guides to show you how to do it! And once you have it installed properly, your new website will have a WordPress dashboard that is easy for any layman to use.

 

Step One:

 

Purchase a hosting plan. Do your research to find out which is the best hosting provider with the best plans and rates for you. A great option is BlueHost. With BlueHost, there is no need to download the WordPress.org’s software. This hosting provider offers one-click installation. They also offer a free domain name.

 

Step Two:

 

Procure a domain name. You can purchase one through your hosting provider or another domain service. It is more efficient to buy one through your hosting provider because then you will not have to deal with pointing your new domain to your hosting account or fiddle with nameservers. Your hosting company will automatically create a folder for you and point the domain to this folder.

 

Step Three:

 

If your hosting provider offers one-click WordPress installation, you can do this now. They will install a database, the files, and connect them. Move on to the final step!

 

If there is no option to install WordPress, you will need to visit WordPress.org and download the file in a zip format. Unzip this main file into a new folder on your hard drive.

 

Step Four:

 

Create an FTP user in your hosting account. Find the instructions for doing so provided by your hosting company. Once the account is created, make sure to write down the host name, user name, password, and port.

 

Step Five:

 

Create a database on your server. Find the instructions for doing so provided by your hosting company. You will also need to create a user for this database. Take note of the user name, the database name, and the password.

 

Step Six:

 

It’s upload time! You can use a free FTP software solution such as Filezilla. Once you have the software downloaded, you need to connect to your site. You will need the information you took note of when setting up your FTP account on your hosting provider. Once connected, you can now transfer files to your root folder which is as simple and “dragging and dropping”. Take care here! It is important to transfer all of the files and folders into your root and not within another folder.

 

Step Seven:

 

Navigate to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php. Follow the directions and input your database connection information, as well as other configuration details.

 

Final Step:

 

You’re done! Visit yourdomain.com/wp-admin to explore the back end and begin customization.

 

If you need more detailed help, feel free to contact me.

 

Other Items to Consider

 

Both options have their pros and cons and there are a myriad of factors to take into consideration.

 

SEO: Using the WordPress.org software is the best option for SEO enhancement with upload freedom and the use of SEO-enhancing plugins. The WordPress.com plans have limited features in SEO, except for the Business Plan which will allow you to upload those same helpful plugins.

 

Code Freedom: Only by downloading the WordPress.org do you have the freedom to manipulate the code. However, this should only be done by experienced developers.

 

Take a look at our handy infographic for even more differences.

 

How to Change Your Text Size and Color in WordPress

change-text-size-color
Please note: This tutorial is for WordPress.org blogs. If you are still using a WordPress.com blog the process may be slightly different. To utilize the full power of WordPress you may want to consider transferring your WordPress.com blog to WordPress.org.

When writing a post in WordPress you will see a few text options on the post editor screen like bold, italics, and strikethrough. But what if you want to change the size of the text? Or the color?

There is seemingly no simple solution for this on the post editor screen, so I am going to show you some workarounds to get it done. This will involve some light HTML coding, but even if you are a beginner you should be able to copy and paste the examples I give to get your desired effect.

The method I am going to show you should only be used if you want to make changes to just a few words in your post. If you don’t like the overall look of the text on your blog, it is better to just install a new theme on your blog that has a font type, size, and color that you like.

 

Changing Text Color

At first look you probably won’t see an easy way to change the text color. This is because, for some reason, the developers of WordPress decided to hide this feature. Here is how to get to it:

  1. In your WordPress dashboard go to the “Posts” section and click on the post you want to edit.
  2. Once you are on the post editor screen click the “Toolbar Toggle” button just about your post (circled in red below).

  1. This will bring up some extra options in the toolbar above your post. One of these options is a “Text color” drop-down box.

  1. Use your mouse to highlight the text you want to change and then click the “Text color” drop-down box. Choose whichever color you like.

  1. Once you have chosen a color you can click the blue “Update” button on the right-hand side to save your changes.

 

Changing Text Size

Changing your text size follows a process similar to the one we used to change the text color. This one is a little more complicated though. Here is how to do it:

  1. In your WordPress dashboard go to the “Posts” section and click on the post you want to edit.
  2. Once you are on the post editor screen click the “Toolbar Toggle” button just about your post (circled in red below).

  1. This will bring up some extra options in the toolbar above your post. One of these options is a drop-down box that says “Paragraph”.

  1. Use your mouse to highlight the text you want to change and then click the “Paragraph” drop-down box. Choose “Heading 3” to follow along with this example.

  1. Once you choose a text size you will notice that it not only changed the text you highlighted, but all of the text in that paragraph!

  1. To fix this, we need to get into the HTML code of the post. To do this, click the “Text” tab (circled below).

  1. Now that you are in “Text” view you will not only see the text of your post, but also the codes that control things like text size. Look at the paragraph where we changed the text size. Just prior to the paragraph you will see this: <h3>
  2. Just after the paragraph you will see this: </h3>

    These codes mark where Heading 3 (the text size we chose in step #4) starts and stops. In order to change this, and only change the size of the text we want, we need to move those codes to the appropriate place. Take a look at the screenshots below to see how to do this:

    Before:

    change-text-size-6

    After:

    change-text-size-7

  1. As you can see, all you need to do is copy and paste the codes to surround the text that you want to change. Once you have done that you can click the blue “Update” button on the right-hand side to save your changes.

 

In addition to changing text size and color, when you click the “Toggle toolbar” button you will see some other new features. These include useful things like underlined text and indentations, so keep the “Toggle toolbar” button in mind in case you need to use these features in the future.

How to Make Your WordPress Blog Private

There are several reasons you may want to have a private blog. You may want to keep your blog private when you are first configuring things to avoid having people see your blog “under construction”. You may also want to create a blog that is not intended for a large audience, but rather just for family and friends.
Either way, I am going to show you a simple way to password protect your blog so that only those with the password can access it.

  1. Login to your WordPress dashboard by going to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin (replace “yoursite.com” with your domain name.
  2. Go to “Plugins ==> Add New” and search for “password protected”
  3. make-wordpress-private-1

  4. In the search results find the plugin names “Password Protected” and click “Install Now”. Click “Activate Plugin” on the next page.
  5. make-wordpress-private-2

     

  6. Navigate to “Settings ==> Password Protected”. Check the “Enabled” box and enter in a new password. Click “Save Changes”.
  7. make-wordpress-private-3

Now anyone who tries to access your blog will be prompted to enter the password in order to view your blog.
Please note: This method does not password-protect image or uploaded files, but someone would have to know the exact URL of the image in order to access it. The primary way someone would learn the exact URL of an image on your blog is through search engines. Because of this, it is a good idea to navigate to “Settings ==> Reading” and check the box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” then click “Save Changes”. This will help to prevent your blog from appearing in search engine results.
make-wordpress-private-4

How to Start a Travel Blog

This article goes into the details of how to start a travel blog. For this article to make sense you should at least have your blog software installed first. If you don’t, check out my free blogging tutorial, and then come back to this article later.

As traveling becomes ever more affordable to the masses, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that it is already one of the hottest blogging niches on the internet. However, while almost anyone can become a travel blogger by sharing stories and tips from their adventures, only a few succeed in reaching out to more than a small audience of friends and family. If you want to become a superstar in the world of travel blogging to the extent that you can earn a respectable income from on-site advertising and relevant affiliate programs, you’re going to need to plan carefully and invest a lot of time in the project.

Given the amount of competition, maintaining a successful travel blog can take some time. If you want to turn your blog into an earner in the future, there are plenty of important considerations to take to heart.

Why Start a Travel Blog Now?

Travel continues to be a growing niche, and while many will say the market is saturated, this is only true in certain areas. Fortunately, travel is a broad subject covering a range of styles, budgets, methods and, of course, geographical locations. By focussing on a specific topic, you’ll be able to reach out to a small but engaged audience. There remains plenty of opportunity to fill a hole in the market, and the world isn’t as small as many people think. The travel and tourism industry continues to evolve as people seek out local experiences and adventure travel makes a comeback like never before. Pop-culture tourism and travel to up-and-coming destinations are also broader than ever, making certain areas of the niche potentially very lucrative.

Who Should Become a Travel Blogger?

Keeping a successful travel blog is not just about sharing your own experiences with the rest of the world. After all, anyone can blog about their adventures, but reaching out to a wider audience requires a rather different approach as well as a lot of hard work. Most importantly, you’ll need to be prepared to invest a lot of time and effort in your blog, and you’ll also need to be consistently active in the travel scene in order to have enough original and engaging material to write about. You’ll also need to prepare for change when it comes to traveling itself, since the clichéd image of a travel writer relaxing on a beach with a laptop is far from accurate in reality. To have any hope of success, you’ll need to learn to balance your time spent getting to know new places with actually working on your blog.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.

Regarding the technicalities involved in starting a travel blog, such as registering a domain name and setting up your content management system (CMS), travel blogging is little different to working with any other niche. However, there are some unique aspects with regards to building and maintaining a successful blog. For a start, travel is a visual topic that relies heavily on quality imagery and video content as well as a creative and personalized blog design. Travel blogging also requires plenty of first-hand knowledge of the type that builds up trust and rapport to the extent your audience will readily approach you for advice. Travel is also one of the hottest topics of conversation, making social media integration and on-site comments critical components of any travel blogging project.

How to Start a Travel Blog

Before you even register a domain name, you’ll want to decide on a specific niche to write about, and it will need to be one that you have a genuine passion for as well as plenty of experience in to get started. Whether your focus is on volunteering experiences, solo travel or luxury travel, you’ll need to narrow it down as much as possible. If you can combine it with another popular topic, such as food or extreme sports, then you’ll have even more chance of standing out among the competition.

When you’ve decided on a niche and you know what you want to start writing about, it will be time to register a domain name. To have any chance of success, you’ll need your own website, preferably with a .com extension. Make your domain name short, catchy and easy to remember. When registering your Web address, consider getting your hosting package through the same company, preferably one offering a one-click WordPress installation. WordPress is the go-to CMS for bloggers, since it provides everything you need for easy customization and content publication without having to know anything about the inner workings of Web design or coding. It’s also open-source and free, and there are countless plugins and themes available.

Many of the major hosting companies, such as Bluehost, provide a one-click WordPress installation that will allow you to have your blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Your website will be live immediately, but until you have decided on the theme and layout and published one or two posts, you may want to use a plugin such as WP Construction Mode to block access to your blog until it’s ready. Once you’ve registered your domain name and got WordPress up and running, you’ll be ready to start customizing your blog with different themes and plugins.

Recommended Themes for Your Travel Blog

With around 10,000 themes available for WordPress, choosing the right one might seem like an impossible task, but there are a few important considerations to help you narrow down your search:

• Responsive themes allow your website to look great on smartphones as well.
• Themes with large headers allow you to display an eye-catching travel image.
• Flat and minimalist designs tend to be more user-friendly and customizable.

If you find yourself stuck trawling through the enormous number of themes available for WordPress, take a look at the following for some inspiration:

Travelify

travel-blog-themes-travelify

Travelify features a responsive design and many additional customization options. However, what makes it a particularly great choice for a travel blog is the way it showcases your content, starting with the opportunity to place a high-resolution header image to capture your reader’s attention.

Surfarama

travel-blog-themes-surfarama

Using a popular tile-based layout that looks particularly great on touch-screen devices such as tablets and smartphones, Surfarama is a great choice for magazine-style travel blogs that are heavily reliant on imagery. It also provides many customization options, including the ability to choose a background image.

Travel Planet

travel-blog-themes-travel-planet

Featuring a clean and minimalistic design with plenty of whitespace to help accentuate a carefully chosen header image, Travel Planet is suitable for almost any travel blog. In niches where visual content is often the main attraction, this lesser-known theme will bring your blog to life without overshadowing your written content.

Adventure Theme

travel-blog-themes-adventure

Adventure Theme costs $69, but it provides many features and an impeccable layout. It’s retina-optimized, fully responsive, and it sports a slideshow showcasing your most popular articles. Designed exclusively for travel blogs, it’s an excellent choice for presenting your content in a professional manner.

Accelerate

travel-blog-themes-accelerate

A popular, multipurpose free theme with outstanding ratings and reviews, Accelerate features a clean, flat design with an emphasis on visual content. It is fully responsive, and your favourite posts may be proudly displayed on your front page in the form of eye-catching thumbnail previews.

Recommended Plugins for Your Travel Blog

Plugins add more functionality to your blog, and any blog should have a few installed. However, it is also important that you choose your plugins carefully, since having too many can slow down your website and make it harder to maintain. In addition to general must-have plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast, W3 Total Cache and Google XML Sitemaps, there are a few plugins that are particularly useful for those that want to be travel bloggers:

WP Smush.it

Travel blogs are heavily reliant on images, particularly large and colourful ones that capture the attention as soon as someone lands on the page. Unfortunately, these images can take up a lot of bandwidth, slowing down your site in the process. However, this plug-in will automatically optimize and compress your image content.

Shadowbox

Another useful plugin for photo-heavy travel blogs, Shadowbox allows your visitors to view images in a far more engaging way by enlarging the image and dimming the background when someone clicks on a thumbnail preview. Visitors can also view multiple images in a single post using a convenient slideshow.

Nomad Word Map

When blogging about your travels, there’s no better way to illustrate your adventures than by creating a customized map pinpointing the place’s you’ve been to. Nomad World Map allows you to add multiple locations to a map and link related blog posts to each point.

WP World Travel

WP World Travel is a premium plugin for travel blogs that displays your current location, travel plans and proposed meetups in each destination. The customizable plugin may be placed as a sidebar widget so that is visible on every page of your blog.

Final Words

To succeed with travel blogging, you’re going to need to market your efforts using social media, particularly with regards to visual platforms like Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest. You’ll need to maintain an active presence on social media by sharing eye-catching photos that truly capture the essence of your written work. As such, travel bloggers will also need to work on their photography skills to complement their posts and marketing efforts.

How to Remove a Page Title in WordPress

Note: This tutorial is for WordPress.org blogs. If you are still using a WordPress.com blog the process may be different. To unleash the full power of WordPress you should considering moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.

At its core, WordPress is very much a content management system for blogging, but thanks to its open-source status and the vast database of plug-ins available for it, the platform is versatile enough for just about any type of website. If you want to get more out of WordPress and have it function as a somewhat different type of system, you’ll need to shape it to your requirements, and this may mean making some tweaks and changes which seem counter-intuitive, such as removing headers and page titles.

By default, page and post titles are displayed at the top of the content, and while these are usually considered to be an important design element, there may be other situations where they get in the way. For example, if you are using WordPress for a single landing page, or you are using a static page as your homepage, you may find that having the title in place gets in the way of the customized style you are trying to go for by cluttering up the page with superfluous content.

The easiest way to remove a title of a page or post is to simply avoid entering one. With pages, you’ll need to enter a title initially before going back and deleting it. However, pages without titles will be labeled as (no title) in the administrator dashboard, and this can make life difficult if you have a large number of such pages. There are also various free plug-ins available through the WordPress plug-in database which provide the functionality to remove titles.

How to Remove a Page Title Manually

If you prefer not to install a plug-in to remove page titles, you can do so manually by making a small modification to the HTML code of the page in question. Technically speaking, this does not remove the title, but it will hide it from the page itself. You’ll still be able to see the page title in the administrator dashboard so that you know where to find your content.

Step 1 – Locate the Class Name of the Title

1. Open the page in your browser to view it as you would if you were a visitor to your website.
Right-click on any blank area of the page and click “View page source” if you’re using Chrome or “View source” if using Internet Explorer.
Press Control + F to open the Find box and enter “h1” without the quotes. The class name of the title will be specified within the h1 tags as shown below:

<h1 class="entry-title">Sample Page</h1>

Here, the class title is “entry-title,” and it will most likely be the same for you.

Step 2 – Locate the Page ID

You’ll now need to find the ID code for the page or post you wish to remove the title for. You can find the ID code either by using a plug-in such as WP Show IDs or by viewing the source code again. If you look at the source code, you should find the ID code just above the class name, such as in the example below:

<div id="post-2" class="post-2 page type-page status-publish hentry">
<h1 class="entry-title">Sample Page</h1>

Make a note of the post ID.

Step 3 – Edit the Stylesheet for Your Theme

You’ll now need to add a short line of code to the stylesheet for your current theme. In your administrator dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Editor > Styles > Stylesheet (style.css). Scroll down to the bottom of the code and enter the following, changing the page ID value and entry title using the information that you noted down in the previous steps:

.post-2 .entry-title display: none;

Click on “Update File” to save your changes, and the title of your page or post will now be hidden. You will need to repeat this step if you ever change or update your WordPress Theme.

Conclusion

Manually hiding post or page titles shouldn’t take more than a few minutes once you have become accustomed to the steps above. However, a slightly quicker and easier way is to use a plug-in such as Title Remover, Toggle the Title, or Hide Page and Post Titles.

Free PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript editor (IDE) – Codelobster PHP Edition

If you are looking to get into the some of the deeper aspects of website and blog design, my HTML tutorial for beginners is a good place to start.  Whether you are learning HTML or some other language, a good IDE is a must to make the process as easy as possible.  There are many paid IDEs, but I recommend checking out Codelobster PHP Edition from Codelobster Software because it is simple to use and free.

Here are a few of the features Codelobster offers:

  • Code highlights depending on type.  Mixed code is also supported, and you can also choose your color scheme.
  • Powerful autocompletion for HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript, including HTML5 and CSS3.
  • HTML/CSS inspector similar to Firebug, which allows you to easily correlate the selected elements of page with a code and style.
  • Context help in all supported languages. English, , German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Turkish,
    Persian
  • PHP debugger allows you to execute PHP scripts incrementally, watching the values of all variables in every line.
  • SQL manager allows you to produce all necessary actions with a database – to add, delete, edit a structure and records in tables, to export data, execute SQL queries.
  • The portable option allows you to use the editor without the preliminary installation.
  • Other useful utilities: pair highlighting, tooltips, preview in a browser, book-marks, and more.

Also there are special plugins for:

  • WordPress
  • CMS: Drupal, Joomla, Magento
  • PHP frameworks: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Yii, Laravel
  • JavaScript libraies: JQuery, Node.js, AngularJS, BackboneJS, MeteorJS
  • Smarty and Twig template engines