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WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

All right, let's talk about the differences between wordpress dot com and wordpress dot or because there's a lot of people that go to wordpress dot com and they think, Oh, this is easy. I just put in my email address and hit, Subscribe, and I'm on the Web, and that's very true. You are. You're on the web immediately with wordpress dot com. The problem with that is is wordpress dot com is somewhat limited. Number one. You don't have full control over the site. Okay, you can't get in there and you can't tweet code. You can't Do you know CSS adjustments? You can't, um, ad in themes that they don't want you to plug ins. They don't want you to all that good stuff. Can't do that with wordpress dot coms Very limited if you're just looking for a quick and dirty way to get yourself online and put out content your want, you know, if you're just purely a content person, the message and the design and all that stuff doesn't matter to you. Wordpress dot com It's fine, OK, but if you want full contr...

ol over your website, which I think most people who are in business, especially the photography business. They do a full control over the site because you control the message you control the look, the feel that motion, everything. Because let's face it, photography is a very emotional craft, right? And so you want to be able to convey to your audience whatever you know, if you think your photography is very happy photography, you want Happy website. You don't want doom and gloom, right? If you want your photography to be really serious and dark and grungy and all that good stuff, you can find a WordPress theme that fits that. The only way to make sure you have full control over that is to use wordpress dot order. Now the difference between the two main differences wordpress dot com They host it for you. Okay, they host it for you. You don't have to buy anything. You don't have to buy domain hosting none of that stuff. Okay, wordpress dot a warg. It's sort of like OK, I'm giving you the body of a really cool car, but you have to put the doors and the interior inside the car. You have to put everything together on your own So you have to come up with the domain. You have to come up with hosting. You have to come up with the ability to, you know, install the software. You have to come up with the themes and all that stuff yourself. All right now, that seems like a daunting task and because I know I saw some wide eyes when I said that. But it's it's not that big of a deal. Okay, So if I had to tell you for business, especially photography, which one to choose? I'm gonna tell you to go with dot org's okay, wordpress dot org's and you can visit that site and download the latest one. Uhm, the cool part about wordpress dot org's is they have a really large information base called the Codex. Um, it's cool to me because I understand it. It's going to be probably irritating to you because it's written in nerd speak or geek speak right, and I know not everybody speaks geek, and that's okay. It took me many, many years to speak geek all right, and I still don't speak it fluently. It's kind of Spanish. I don't speak. Definitely, I can say Olen audios and stuff like that. But I cannot, you know, I can't speak it fluently. So what I'm gonna do, hopefully within the next three days, I'm going to simplify the terminology and the processes that go into tweaking WordPress and hopefully make that a little bit more understandable to you. Because at the core, where press is nothing more than a bunch of toggles and switches, okay? And once you figure out how to do the toggles and switches, it's gonna be easy. Easy? Okay. Any questions about any of that So far? Yeah. Go ahead. Justin. I just had a quick question about your background. Did you, um, before you start doing WordPress sites to Jude use Dreamweaver. Yeah. Just build straight sites before that. And before wordpress feeling Get down to where I started. I started on Geo City's. Yeah, okay. Spinning skulls and Marquis rain bows, right? Greatest thing ever. Um, but yeah, I did static sites before this, which was just html CSS and I put those together in Dreamweaver a code or whatever I was using. And I felt the need to change what I was doing when I started creating content because most of time. Static websites. That's what they are. They're information. It's like a brochure. OK, think of it this way. Okay. Static websites are a brochure. WordPress is a TV show because the brochure is very static. You print it once, and there it iss. The TV show is always evolving. There's new episode every week. There's a new upset every day, whatever it might be. And so that's what WordPress is. It allows you to do a new episode every day, change the look and feel every day. And as I evolved myself too, you know, put out more content videos. For instance, I started with the whole, you know, the YouTube revolution and all that junk. Um, that's what I needed. I needed something that because it's a pain to go into a static website and add new content all the time because we have to change code. But in WordPress, it's just a simple posting screen, which looks a lot like Microsoft Word. And so I found that to be much more appealing to me. Um, it's evolved a lot over the years, and so WordPress now is a whole lot easier than WordPress. 34 years ago, but, yeah, that's where I started. Cool. So thank you. Yeah, I have a question from Sam Cox. If a person starts with dot com, can he switched to dot Or Glater? Yes, you can. You can absolutely go from one to the other. I believe there's an export tool inside of wordpress dot com that allows you to take, you know, site from one place to the other. If you export out of dot com there several plug ins you can use to migrate your stuff on Day three, we're gonna talk about restoring backing up in migrating sites. So I'm gonna talk about all that kind of stuff. All right? Okay. So let's take a look at wordpress dot com, shall we? And we'll take a look at exactly what you need to do on wordpress dot com. So if this is for you, I'm gonna show you how to get into it. Okay? If it's not for you, you can do me all for justice. So on wordpress dot com, you just go to getting started, right? Right there on the left. And it's very simple. You pick a block address, okay. By a default, it's free, but your it's gonna be your name dot wordpress dot com. If you're not concerned with your brand, that's not a big deal. I, however, am very protective of my personal brand, so I would want Justin Seeley dot com. Right. If you want to use a dot media dot com and dot net or a dot org's, you can see there they have prices, respectively. Why dot me is $24? I have no idea. I thought that dot com would be the top one, but it's not, um, but dot com 17 bucks a year. That's not bad. Okay, that's not bad at all. Um, considering that most hosting plans are going to run you, you know, a couple a year Theoretically, um, so you just pick that out. You write in your blogging dress alike here. Let's do WP for photo hog dot wordpress dot com. It's gonna check and make sure that's available, and it's going to say, Did you like the domain? WP four photo dot com as well. It's also available, and so basically they do a little search, and they let you know that the dot com is available to Upsell, right? It's It's nothing more than an up sell. And you know you can use this on your block for $17 a year. And in this case, you know most of people that are going for wordpress dot com, they're going for the freebie. So let's just say no, I just want to freedom. You pick out a user name that BP for photo automatically populates if it if it's good, it puts a little check mark there. If it's in use by somebody else, have tell you. Okay, you set up your password, confirmed the password email address, and then you just set up some stuff like English and all that good stuff, right? Here are the points of upgrading On wordpress dot com, you get a free belong no matter what. OK, but you cannot use a domain name or mapping, And if you don't know what mapping is, that's OK. We'll talk about that a little bit. Okay. Cannot use that with the free version. You cannot use more than five gigabytes of space. So if you're gonna be using this to distribute large photographs, if we're taking commercial photos, you all know how big those arm. So five gigs of space that's gonna be going pretty soon. Uh, no ads. They do run ads on work, President, go unfortunately, but that's how they make money. Um, you do not get to customize the design. You're stuck with what they give you, okay, So you don't get that you don't get that level of customization. You do not get access to something called video press. Video press is a pretty cool little service that allows you to instantly put videos you know, into your WordPress site and stuff like that. If you ever go to the wordpress dot TV site, it is run through video press. It's a really cool site. But there are also several free plug ins that you can use on your self hosted WordPress block that do exactly the same thing. So you don't necessarily have to have that. Okay, you can upgrade to all of these for 99 bucks a year. Um, or you could just say no. No, thank you. Create my belong. Once you created your belong, it's gonna log you into your account, and you're gonna be able to go in and mess with word precious like you would anywhere else. Okay, um, we're gonna cover WordPress soup to nuts. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna actually create a block here and walk through it cause I'm gonna do it self hosted in just a minute. But I just want to give you an idea of how to set up wordpress dot com. That's in. That's that's how it is. And it's literally it's just get your own wordpress dot com account in seconds. That's absolutely true. Okay, so that's the cheap and easy route. If you're nothing more than a content creator, that's, you know that's for you. But if you really want, you know, you want to create a site like this or like this, or like this, you're gonna have to do the self hosted version of WordPress. Okay, question. So I am sorry. What's the difference between self hosted and fully hosted by, like, dream host? Okay, that's the same thing. Yeah, it's the same thing. Yeah, I call it self hosted, because theoretically, you own that space at dream host or wherever you are. And so you know you're hosting it yourself. Um, they technically you host it for you but you're hosting it on your own piece of their server that you theoretically own. Okay. All right. Justin, I have a question. You, um and I imagine you're gonna cover this, but Debbie is asking. I already have my name dot com through. Go, Daddy, How does that work with WORDPRESS? Okay, we are gonna cover that in a future section here, coming up when I talk about the recipe for creating a block. But the short answer would be that you can use go daddy to do WordPress. They have wordpress installation methods Through Go, Daddy, if you host there, I'm not sure if you host there or not. Um, so you know, you have to know where your domain is registered and where your domain is hosted. That's two totally separate things. So we're gonna talk about that in just a minute.