Is WordPress right for me?
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Hi,
I would like to start a review blog on guitar playing related accessories starting with guitar picks and branching out to strings etc. After generating the appropriate amount of traffic I may want to monetize the site in the future. I already have a domain registered with DNS and email hosted at Rackspace. I don’t have much of a budget to get started, so I am wondering if WordPress will work for me or will I paint myself into a corner I don’t want to be in. Would I be better off hosting my site at web site hosting company like squarespace.com?
Thanks!
Kris -
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/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/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.
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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