Why WordPress.com

Wordpress.com

My experience with CMS dates from the Mambo era, starting in the year 2000.  I used to be a Mambo/Joomla fan who ended up switching to WordPress in 2005.

 

WordPress.com offers the best option for my project because it is not only free but also advertisement-free.  Therefore, all my students should have access to a site and domain of their own at no cost.

There is much written about the advantages of WordPress and WordPress.com.  I would only like to emphasize here what probably most people are saying about this free and high quality service.

Besides the fact that it WordPress.com is free and advertisement free, I strongly recommend to use WordPress.com in the ETA because of the following reasons:

• Very quick start.  It usually takes my students between one to two minutes to create a site (without content, certainly)
• Very intuitive so that students can create a site with three to five pages in thirty minutes to one hour without guidance.
• Functional and without a need to be maintained (as opposed to having a WordPress.org site you could host yourself or pay to have hosted)
• Excellent for SEO; i.e. to be found in Google and the-like searches
• Multimedia ready.  WordPress.com sites are all set to display content from Youtube, Dailymotion, etc. for videos.  For audio files or podcasts, BlipTV is a reliable free option, and is WordPress.com-ready.
• I find WordPress.com so appropriate for the task that I could not say anything negative about it except for a very little detail–I wish the mShots sites previews in this blog were disabled by default (just in case, if you want to turn it off but do not know how, go to Appearence/Extras)