WordPress Features

04Feb08

Here is a list of features offered by WordPress.com. Not complete but hey, its got all the important ones.

It Takes Seconds and is Free!

You can get a blog started in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. All you need is an email address and a name. You can blog as much as you want for free, our paid upgrades are completely optional. Check out what our signup process looks like.

Dozens of Gorgeous Themes

You can change the look of your blog with dozens of attractive themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button. Each theme allows you to rearrange and customize your sidebar using widgets, and several themes let you upload your own photo or image for the header bar. We add themes regularly based on user requests. If you’re a CSS pro, you can also customize your CSS code.

Categorize and Tag Your Posts

WordPress.com includes an easy system which allows you to categorize and tag your posts while you write them. We automatically create archives based on your categories and add them to our global tag system and our tag surfer, so other people interested in the same topics you are will find your post and leave comments on your blog.

Spell-check, Previews, Autosave, Words, Photos, Videos and Audios

Our built-in rich text editor makes it easy to create great looking posts. You can upload your own photos or easily include images from other services like Flickr or Photobucket. You can even embed videos from places like YouTube or Google. To keep you from looking too silly, we include an inline spell-checker that makes it easy to proof your posts. We also have a preview feature that shows you exactly what your post or page will look like before you publish them for the world to see. Finally we know how frustrating it can be to lose hours of hard work, so every minute when you’re writing a post we save it to the server to keep your post safe in case your computer crashes or something else happens. Odeo music files can be embedded into your posts.

Lots of Privacy Options, including Members-Only Blogs

WordPress.com allows you to have a completely public blog, a blog which is public but not included in search engines or our public listings, or a private blog which only members can access. If you want a public blog, but only occasionally post something private, we have a per-post password option, too!

Import from Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, and More

If you already have a blog elsewhere and would like to move it over to WordPress.com, we provide several import options that can import posts and comments.

Great Help If You Need It

If you have questions about using or extending your blog, we’ve got some of the most responsive support around. We’ve got friendly fellow users in the forums and on our support team who will help you out. There is a feedback form on every page, a contact form, and the forums are active 24 hours a day.

Integrated Stats System

We have an integrated stats system which gives you up-to-the-minute stats on how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, which posts are most popular, and which search engine terms are sending people to your blog.

A Great Blogging Community

WordPress.com is a community and conversations continue from one blog post to another and through the comments. Our tag surfer feature makes it easy for you to find like minded bloggers interested in the same topics as you and connect with them.

Easily Track Followups to your Comments

When you’re signed in and leave a comment on WordPress.com, we have a special page which notifies you of any followups to your comment so you can easily follow your conversations no matter what blog they’re on.

Automatic Spam Protection

WordPress.com uses Akismet, the world’s best comment and trackback spam technology. It blocks spammers from leaving spam comments on your blog (we block over 1,000 spam comments a day for some of our bloggers!). Akismet also helps us shut down spam blogs that try to sneak onto WordPress.com (so your blog won’t be in the same community as some Viagra touting site). If a spam comment or blog slips through, you can report them and help get them blocked from the system.

Sidebar Widgets for Flickr, del.icio.us, Meebo, and More

You can add “widgets” to your sidebar and rearrange them without touching any HTML code or messing up your blog. Just drag and drop the sidebar widgets around, and instantly you can have fun stuff in your sidebar. We’re adding new widgets all the time based on your feedback and requests.

Manage Regular Pages, not Just Blog Posts

WordPress.com has a feature called “pages” which allows you to easily create web pages. For example, you could add an “about me” page with your biography, and a link to that page would be automatically added to your sidebar. You can even create an entire web site using pages on WordPress.com, with a custom home page and your blog as one of the sub-pages.

Feed Stats

All WordPress.com blogs support RSS, which is a way for people to subscribe to updates on your blog using services like My Yahoo or Bloglines. Most stats systems ignore readers coming from these services, but we do our best to tell you how many people are subscribed to your feed, a feature that very few people outside of us and Feedburner offer.

Export

You can leave WordPress.com any time you want and your content isn’t locked in. We provide a complete XML export of all your posts and comments.

Multiple Blogs and Multiple Authors

You can have as many blogs as you want! You’re only limited by your imagination. You can have group blogs with multiple authors who are allowed to post or contribute. This is great for topic blogs for things like books or politics, or just a blog for you and your friends in one place.

No Rebuilding

Every change and edit you make to your blog is INSTANT, there is no rebuilding or waiting. Same for comments.

Very Fast and Reliable Service

Last but not least, we run dozens of servers in two datacenters (Dallas and San Diego) with instant copies of all your data and uploads in each. This allows us to serve your blog very quickly, and also if something catastrophic were to happen, like California falling into the ocean or Dallas being hit by a meteor, your blog would be okay. (Even though if that happened you’d probably have bigger things on your mind.) 99.9% of blog hosts out there just have one datacenter.

Here’s a sampling of features that might make you want to use WordPress.com. (Besides it being run by some swell folks!) We’re not fancy-pants marketers, just a group of geeks who are passionate about enabling people to publish on the web. You can explore our features below, or you can go here to see what some of our users like about WordPress.com. When you’re ready, we’d love to have you sign up for a blog with us!

And many more to be updated so sit tight. You can also track this here.

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