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Total control and easy-to-use.
With Wordpress ®, you own your own blog. Your blog is not dependent on a blogging service's hosting or publishing service. In fact, you can install as many Wordpress ® installed blogs on your own hosting accounts, across as many of your domains as you want, and you enjoy total control over them.
Plus all you need to do after you install, is to login, write a new entry, click publish and you're done. Easy as 1-2-3.
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Cost-effective. C'mon, it's free.
As mentioned before, Wordpress ® is open source, which offers you a free blogging application to use today. As a result, you can install multiple blogs across your many domains without any concern of incurring costs.
Compared with other blogging applications that charge a monthly fee for you to blog, Wordpress ® is a free to use application.
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Strong community of users and developers.
Wordpress ® has a strong user and developer community, with comprehensive support and documentation (although the geek-speak will go over a beginner's head - that's why we're here to un-geek it all for you).
With a strong user base, many of the "bugs" get worked out very quickly with revisions. Plus with so many users, there are many guides and workarounds featured on blogs created to help others in the community.
These developers create modules of code, called "plugins", which offer enhanced performance and functionality for your blog. There are many plugins available for free downloads from developer blogs.
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Convenient 1-click install.
Installing a Wordpress ® blog is a cinch with its 1-click install feature offered via Fantastico in a cPanel hosting company's control panel.
If the above sounds foreign to you, here's the cheat sheet:
a. cPanel: short for Control Panel. Wordpress ® is hosted on your own host account and if your host offers a 'cPanel' interface, then you're good to go with the next phrase...
b. Fantastico: a feature of cPanel, which allows you to install free scripts on your website with a click of a button.
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Customize templates, themes and colors conveniently.
Easily edit a Wordpress ® blog's templates and colors via cascading style sheets (CSS).
CSS is a simple mechanism for customising the formatting of Web pages, by defining fonts, colours of titles, paragraph spacing, etc. so that a change to the CSS enables those changes to reflect across the entire site in one fell swoop.
In addition, there are many talented creative developers in the Wordpress ® community who create themes or design layouts that enable you to switch your blog's theme with the ease of 1-click. Simply upload the designers' theme, and activate it in your Wordpress ® blog's Presentation Theme control panel.
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Customize blog directories to update or "ping".
"Pinging" is a notification to blog directories that your blog has a new page addition, and encourages them to visit your blog and index it into its database.
Other blogging platforms set a default ping to only one blog directory. This limits your automatic notification for pinging.
In comparison, Wordpress ® offers you a Notification Panel that you can insert additional blog directories to "ping". This affords you to be indexed by a wider base of blog directories, which helps in expanding the exposure of your blog.
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Connection times.
When you're blogging with blogging platforms that host the blogs for you (where you have to login to their service to make entries to your blog), you're dependent on their servers for publishing your posts. Because of the vast number of bloggers using their network, publishing times can slow down to a crawl. (it's like watching paint dry!)
However, publishing with Wordpress ® is reliant on your own host company's server - which is typically much faster. Blogging with Wordpress ® offers almost no wait time, and speeds up your blog publishing.
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Categories and sub-categories.
Categories offer you the links in the side navigation to provide sections that your visitors can click on.
One major frustration with Blogger, another blogging platform, is a lack of a categorization or sub-categorization features. To offer links in the sidebar navigation, one has to wade in code to add it manually.
With Wordpress ®, categories come standard. Simply add categories and sub-categories for easy organization and usability for your blog.
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Comment capabilities.
A 'Comment' is a feature that encourages your visitors to offer feedback or participate in a discussion about your postings. This feedback gives you an immediate connection with your visitors, and this helps you determine how to serve the needs of your audience more effectively.
With Wordpress ®, you can choose to either receive comments or not. You can also choose to moderate comments, in order to manage derogatory comments from appearing on your blog comments.
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Revenue-generating flexibility.
Businesses and marketers consider tools such as the Wordpress ® blogging application with respect to how well these tools serve them to reach their desired outcomes - one of which is to generate profit.
With Wordpress ®, you can easily add contextual advertising (like Google Adsense or Yahoo Publishers Network ads), links to merchants or suppliers you're affiliated with, and also promote your own product and service offerings.
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Next step ...
Now you know why to use Wordpress ® - for choice, control, community and its capabilities - how can you begin blogging with your own Wordpress ® blog? I recommend our comprehensive suite of Wordpress ® video tutorials.
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