WordPress.com

Bottom Line

WordPress.com is a free online web design program that allows everyone, especially beginners, to create a good-looking and functional website or blog in a matter of hours. Start by naming your website and selecting a theme from one of the hundreds available, and you'll get a blank page on which to drag and drop the page elements and widgets you want, rearranging them until you're satisfied. WordPress.com can also host your website, so you don't need any technical computer knowledge to keep your site up and running.

Setup

Up and running quickly. Jill Duffy of PCMag.com says, "Commit to WordPress and you can't go wrong," and she gives the product an Editor's Choice award. Setting up a WordPress.com website is simple and straightforward: Enter your email address, create a user name and password and name your first website. You're then led through a series of choices to create your website, starting with selecting a theme from more than 200 designs and customizing the header with your website name.

Everything that you need to design your webpage is on the dashboard screen, with the tools categorized on the left side of the screen. You don't have to worry about your initial decisions, because everything, except for the website's URL and name, can be changed at a later date. There's also a feature to import existing blog content from Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad, Posterous, Vox or LiveJournal.

Ease Of Use

Drag and drop everything. WordPress.com has extensive flexibility for you to create new web pages, update existing ones and post blog entries. Everything is drag-and-drop, and you can see your changes instantly. Templates have one or two sidebars to use, and whatever widgets you place in them appear

Features

Hundreds of free layouts. The free version of WordPress.com provides all that you need to set up, run and monitor your website. You get web hosting with 3 GB of storage, automatic backups and software upgrades, multilingual themes and comment tracking. However, your domain name will end in a .wordpress.com suffix, unless you purchase a custom name. Upgrades, including 10 GB of storage, custom designs and premium themes, are available individually or bundled at a discounted price.

Creating text for your web page is done onscreen; if you have knowledge of HTML, you can view and edit the code as well. Widgets such as site search, entry archiving and user comments can be added with ease. The downside is that you cannot use any widgets other than those provided, and you cannot code your own.

WordPress.com provides tools for site management and organization. Tracking and publishing tools are built into the software, and the statistics give a real-time view of the traffic to your website. You can use the tagging and categorization features to broadly and narrowly organize your blog content. There's also a well-reviewed free app to post to your WordPress.com website from your iPhone or iPad.