Domains, plans and themes
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If I have the free plan and register a custom domain, can I still use crowdfunding themes, or must I upgrade to premium? If I do not upgrade, does buying the theme upgrade me to premium, or am I still using the free plan?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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No.
Upgrading makes no difference.
No. Purchasing a premium theme is not a means of upgrading to the Premium upgrade bundle. That bundle does not include any Premium themes. -
Every premium theme is individually priced and the Premium upgrade does not provide for any premium themes. http://en.support.wordpress.com/themes/premium-themes/
WordPress.com provides free blogs and hosts them free of charge. There are no bandwidth charges. All WordPress.com blogs come with 3000 megabytes (~3 GBs) of space for storing uploaded files and images. Free features are listed here https://en.wordpress.com/features/
See here for details of all 3 plans http://store.wordpress.com/bundles/ offered by WordPress.com.
Premium bundle details http://store.wordpress.com/plans/premium/
Business bundle details http://store.wordpress.com/plans/business/Note that each upgrade bundle applies to a single blog only and is for a single year only when it is due to be renewed.
You must be logged in as Admin http://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/#administrator under the exact same username account that registered the blog to access the blog’s dashboard and purchase upgrades at > Store > My Upgrades
Your billing history will be at Dashboard > Store > Billing History
Your options for payment are found here http://en.support.wordpress.com/payment/Also note that the free plan and the Premium plan do not allow you to upload your own themes or plugins. WordPress.com blogs cannot be equipped for eCommerce transactions unless they have the $299. per year Business upgrade. https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/ecommerce-is-now-available-on-wordpresscom?replies=1
See here for ecommerce details http://en.support.wordpress.com/ecommerce/Provided you are selling only what you yourself make or a service that you personally provide you have two options that require no upgrading.
(1) Know that the only instructions that will work for posting a PayPal donation button on a WordPress.com blog are found here http://en.support.wordpress.com/paypal/(2) If you set up an Ecommerce site somewhere else online you can create a custom menu http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/ and include a custom link to that site in it. http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/#adding-custom-links
Some bloggers create a contact form and after the people have made a PayPal donation they provide the link to a private page for downloading files. Maybe that will work for you.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/page-visibility/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/paypal/Otherwise, no blogger initiated advertising is allowed on WordPress.com blogs. The only advertising program at WordPress.com is called WordAds and it’s for blogs on their own domains.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/
http://en.wordpress.com/apply-for-wordads/Advertising outside of WordAds at WordPress.com is not allowed.
http://support.wordpress.com/advertising/ Here’s what gets a blog suspended:
http://wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/affiliate-links/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/suspended-blogs/
http://en.wordpress.com/tos/1. WordPress.com allows bloggers to insert text affiliate links within post and page content to most third-party affiliate programs, provided they are not the primary content of the site in question.
2. Image affiliate links in posts and pages and any banners, affiliate links in sidebar or footer widget areas, are still considered to be advertising and are not allowed on WordPress.com blogs.
If you want to purchase domain mapping upgrade then read and act on what follows.
In order to map to a domain one must have an underlying .wordpress.com subdomain blog to map from, and the domain name you desire must be available for purchase, or you must already own the domain URL.
You must be logged in as Admin http://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/#administrator under the exact same username account that registered the blog to access the blog’s dashboard at > Store > My Upgrades to purchase upgrades for the blog.
See here if you do not own a domain http://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/
See here for mapping an existing domain that you already own http://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/map-existing-domain/
if you already have a website you don’t want to affect, and you want to add a blog to it under a subdomain (for example, blog.yourgroovydomain.com) see here http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/map-subdomain/
After you do the primary blog set up it can take between 24 – 72 hours for domain name propagation to take place throughout the internet. You can view the DNS changes here > http://www.whatsmydns.net/ What’s important during that stage is to be patient.
A self-hosted WordPress site might be right for you. WordPress.org offers free software that you can install on a web server. You can upload and install themes and plugins, run ads, conduct ecommerce and edit the database. Learn about the differences here. http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
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Thank you so much for your help! You have answered my questions in a way I was afraid I would not get. Not only that, but you made me realize that I had missed on the plugin I was considering (ignitiondeck) that it is only available on wordpress.org, not .com.
As I am not seeking to do ecommerce, but want to raise funds for a nonprofit project I will be piloting, I think it makes more sense to go the paypal or crowdfunding platform route, so I will look further into that.
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I almost forgot two questions:
If I sell secondhand goods (in addition to homemade goods), do you know if that violates the terms of service? (I checked and I think that is okay)
Also, if I understand correctly, a free plan can register a domain name, the only payment being for the domain name. Is that correct?
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