WordPress.com announced that there are now more than 50 million blogs powered by WordPress’s open source software. About half of those blogs are hosted at WordPress.com while the others reside on blog owners own servers or server space rented from hosting providers.
WordPress.com hosts sites for free, though there are features you can buy including paying $30 a year to eliminate ads on your site or fees that larger blogs can pay to increase the amount of available storage.
There are two ways to use WordPress. You can set up a free blog at WordPress.com or you can either install the free open source WordPress software on any Internet hosting service’s servers or use the software that many service providers have preinstalled on their servers. For example, this blog is hosted by Bluehost.com which charges me $5.95 a month to host an unlimited number of domains (I use the same account to host SafeKids.com, SafeTeens.com and NoBellyPrize.com). There are plenty of other companies that host WordPress sites as you can see from this Google search.
Getting started with WordPress is actually pretty easy. After you establish an account with WordPress.com or one of the other hosting services, you need to select a theme (or stick with the default theme) and then just go to the WordPress dashboard to type in your first blog post. Themes, by the way, determine the way your blog is going to look, and what’s great about themes is that if you don’t like the look, you can easily change themes without affecting the content of your blog.
WordPress is used by an incredibly wide variety of individuals and organizations including some very impressive ones like my friend Harry McCracken’s Technologizer site and All Things Digital which is part of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Even CBS Radio uses WordPress for some of its websites and blogs.
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