Re:Wordpress.com or .org

Hi Jason - Happy New Year !

I have a WORDPRESS question for you. .COM or .ORG. I've come to realize are 2 different beasts.

The KSisters are about to start a new project - untitled as yet even though the first "call for stories" will air on NPR late this month. NPR is supposed to be hosting the page on their site which will be able to let listeners contribute their video's (via Youtube), photos and audio stories BUT so far none of that is been done.

RIGHT now TKSisters need to have at very least a BLOG where we can post and others can contribute their stories,videos,photos etc....and COMMENT. We have to show something to that is interactive to our grantors. Ultimately, NPR would be caring the load of this material and maybe we would intergrate this blog into a wordpress site if need be.
It's hard to tell right now.


I've been fooling around in wordpress with elements : kitchensisters.wordpress.com
but need to modify and am wondering if we should be working in wordpress.org with their customizable css instead.
I have read some of the "pros" & "cons" for .org > including that we have to manage SPAM / backups / among other things.

We want to use the blog to do the following:
Post stories that have already come in. Some are photo essays / some story proposals etc
Post videos w/in a story submission
Allow Comments
Post a list of "people they should know" with links
Publicize the series
and get the best result - re SEO
----
note:

We like the structure of another blog : www.grainedit.com
- how the FEATURES are image headers
- his use of slideshows within the post
All these things I realize are done w/ css customization - the question is does that mean we would need to go towards .org or are these things something we could accomplish with a css upgrade acct w/ wordpress.com ?


ok - what might your thoughts be ?
FYI: I am working on a MAC

Thanks !

ok - I just found this online regarding a "hazard" of moving over to .org later.

True That ?

Currently I have my blog on Wordpress.com and am thinking of switching to self hosted on .org. I’m pretty high in Google rankings for my main keywords, either page 1 or top of 2 and my blog is quickly indexed by Google Blogsearch. Is a lot of that due to the popularity of Wordress.com itself? I assume I am getting some push in rankings from them.

On balance, I don't think that there is much (if any) difference between a wordpress.com site and a self-hosted WP site. It's the content of the pages, how they are crafted and how many inbound links you are pulling in that determines your PR.

If you move from .com to self-hosted, you will, obviously, have to start pretty much all over again building up the PR for your new site but if you keep the wordpress.com site going for a short while, you might be able to push traffic over to the self-hosted site and build the new site up that much faster.

Plugins aren't the "be all and end all" for SEO and it's unwise to reply upon them. SEO is far more complex that throwing in a few meta tags and some nice permalinks. See quirm.net/2009/07/02/wordpress-search-engine-optimisation/ for some

Hi Laura, Happy New Year to you too!

Good to hear from you. You always remind me that I have a forum Actually, I don't do a good job of letting people know of the resource, but maybe that will be my New Years Resolution....

Well you have a wide range of questions. Honestly, there's so much to it that there's no way I could answer it all here. But I'll do my best to give you the quick answer.

As far as wordpress.org vs. .com, to me it's a no brainer for you. Choose wordpress.org all the way... and move over soon. True some things are taken care of for you by the hosted version (.com), but the drawbacks and limitations by far make up for it. Wordpress.com should really only be used by those who need a quick and very simple blog.

Going with the hosted version has several important advantages: With wordpress.com, you are limited to a certain number of tempalates and extensions to use. You also can't alter the template markup (to my knowledge although I could be wrong about that). You certainly can't alter the code of Wordpress itself, which is often needed for a more customized site.

Creating a site anything like www.grainedit.com would pretty much be impossible without a self-hosted version of wordpress. In fact, that site is pretty darned complex... so prepare for a lot of learning and experimenting with plugins if you hope to get there. So IMO, it's better to get on the right foundation sooner than later.

As far as SEO, have you seen my blog post: www.jasongallagher.org/blog/website-desi...engine-secrets.html? I think it gives a pretty good rundown on SEO in general. The rules of SEO are pretty universal no matter what application you might be using (Dremweaver, Wordpress, Joomla, etc.). With Wordpress.com, you may have a certain advantage for being part of the "Wordpress" domain, but I don't think it's great (if anything much at all)... and Kitchen Sisters is popular enough to stand on its own. There is a must have plugin for SEO in Wordpress: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ SEO by the way is just one reason why you don't want to start on .com now, then move to .org later.

Now that I've said that, I'll make a shameless plug... As I've always said before, what the KS can really use is a new website design in a CMS. If you're about to put a lot of work into a blog, why not think about the bigger picture? There would be several good reasons at this point to consider a move to an all in one solution (site and blog). One, it would be a unified interface and branding. Two, everything could be maintained in one location. Three, your link juice would stay with www.kitchensisters.org instead of being spread out to your blog's domain (this can work out to be both good and bad but I think would be better as one domain for KS).

Lastly you could finally update the KS main site, make it more modern with interactive social networking features, make managing content simple (and consistent throughout the site). While this would obviously be a fairly large investment, I do think it could greatly increase interest on the site as well as save (a lot) of time on maintenance expense. The process of adding and maintaining a blog would also be much simpler (adding a full featured blog to an existing CMS is no big deal).

But don't look at Wordpress for the main KS site. You'd need something that can handle a more complex information hierarchy and set of features like Joomla or Drupal. Let me know if you want to talk about this!

Jason

This is about a year old, but still mostly valid I think:

www.expand2web.com/blog/wordpressorg-vs-...ch-one-should-i-use/

Wordpress's official statement:

en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

As you can see, any kind of meaningful customization and use of plugins requires .org. I wouldn't worry about it. Since you already know how to manage a Dreamweaver site, it's nothing to be afraid of.

ok - we'll go for it.
so we shouldn't be worried about handling the SPAM and the backups ?
should we just put up a wpress site that has a blog so we can use a feature that would be SO helpful to promote the series .... like a flash feature... in the allure theme.... www.studiopress.com/themes/allure - we can show a lot of the direction of the series initially this way

it's so hard to know how REDUNDANT this blog will be to whatever NPR eventually comes up with.
All we know is that they want to host any youtube submissions cuz they haven't done that before.

so - we don't want to build out a redundant blog but we need to show those features to satisfy our grantors right now.
NPR is dragging it's feet per usual.

(unless KS gets some grant money I don't know how this new series is going to fly. i know that they would SO LOVE to get a new KS site but when and how I just don't know. Absolutely scraping by. When they do - they'll certainly want to integrate their blog onto/into it and I will send them to you for your services cuz I know I won't be up to the task.)


CHEERS !!
L

so we shouldn't be worried about handling the SPAM and the backups ?

Concerned yes, worried no. Making backups isn't hard (and there are plugins) and you can even hire a programmer to set up a CHRON job to automate them if you like. Is spam handling any better on .com? If so, I have no idea how. WP comes with the askimet plugin which will do a lot to help:

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog's "Comments" admin screen

And you could always install a captcha (the little boxed thing by the submit button that makes you verify some type).

Didn't know NPR had a vested interest directly in the KS site/blog?? Well, granters are granters...

(unless KS gets some grant money I don't know how this new series is going to fly. i know that they would SO LOVE to get a new KS site but when and how I just don't know. Absolutely scraping by. When they do - they'll certainly want to integrate their blog onto/into it and I will send them to you for your services cuz I know I won't be up to the task.)


Understood. But seriously, if the KS are ready to invest in any area at this time (or anytime), I would think the website would be a very interesting thing to consider (all things considered!). There are probably very few ways to create the increased outreach on all levels that a revamped main site with social features can offer. I'm mentioning it now because a Wordpress blog on the level you'd like is a pretty big undertaking on its own. Combining it with the main site would make a lot of sense economically. By the way if for some reason they ever did want to do it... we could always collaborate on the design if you wanted to add your touch

Oh..!! I never thought that there is a lot of difference in .COM and .ORG

It is this post that brings the difference between these two...I have a blog on wordpress.com,but never thought about these differences...Thanks for telling this..

Nick Greyy.