Hi all, another guest post today. This one from Joe Johnson who runs a few niche ecommerce sites and loves WordPress (don’t we all). We’ve been using WordPress a lot lately (this site runs on WordPress) and in the article below Joe talks about the difference between a self hosted version of WordPress and a WordPress.com site.

Systems like WordPress have revolutionised the world of web design and blogging. Not so long ago, anyone wanting to create their own self-hosted site would had to have been a coding Ninja or proficient in a complex web design program such as Dreamweaver. Nowadays, anyone with a meager amount of technical knowledge can create beautiful, functional webpages, all thanks to open source content management systems like WordPress.

WordPress is one of many freely available open source Content Management Systems. In the early days it captured the hearts of bloggers with it’s advanced but simple interface for creating blogs. However over the years it has been embraced by small businesses as a really easy to use content management system for a typical small business websites (that may or may not have a blog as part of it). With the recent update to WordPress 3, this switch over towards being more of a general CMS is more evident. The interface now is geared juts as much towards managing a website as it is towards managing a blog. Read More…