I have been experimenting with various ways to implement WordPress for my blog. The first thing I tried was a hosted blog on WordPress.com. If you have simple needs like just posting a diary or sharing information with family and friends, or doing a simple add-on to your own web site then the free wordpress.com is likely for you.

The pros are that it’s a simple process from start to finish. But if you want to add a domain name you either have to buy it elsewhere at a service that allows domain forwarding and gripping (1) and make sure it loads your mysite.wordpress.com web site, or you have to pay wordpress.com $15/year to do that for you. If you want to add any plugins that commercialize your blog, you’re also out of luck. In an interesting inversion, the .com site for wordpress is for the community of free wordpress users, and the .org site is for those who want to run wordpress in a self-hosted environment to take advantage of the many options not available to the .com users, namely – plugins to commercialize your blog, and huge template selection from within wordpress.org and all of the separate providers, like www.colorlabs.com and uniqueblogdesigns.com, my current favorites.

Also, if you’re someone with a bit of programming skills and you like to tinker with CSS, you can try it on wordpress.com but you must buy a premium upgrade for the changes to ‘stick’. Running a self-hosted blog basically means you can roll up your sleeves and get in there with the design wrenches, if you care to. The two third-party wordpress template providers I mentioned above give you dead-easy management of your blog without having to touch code… and if you want to take it further you can.

I find for most entry level blogs, the selection of templates at WordPress.com is adequate. Most designs come in several colors, and you can substitute your own header graphics, so long as you make them the size WordPress recommends in the editing area. And you can always commercialize them the cheap-and-dirty way by just including the banner ad code in the top of a post, and hosting the actual ad on space you have elsewhere online. Often businesses that have affiliate networks provide code for copying and pasting into a post or an ad management module and their graphics are hosted on their own site to both control the brand and make it easier for the end user to send them traffic – because hey, that’s what it’s all about, right?

WHY I PREFER SELF-HOSTED

I’m such a sucker for design and control. When blogs started getting popular, I toyed with the idea of getting into the business of designing themes. After all, I’ve been in web design for a dozen years, so it can’t be too hard…

I remember getting slammed in the early newsgroups because I bought one of the first versions of Dreamweaver back when it was Macromedia – version 1. The so-called ‘elite’ coders were disgusted that I didn’t hand-code all of my pages. I almost quit building my very successful tourism site, www.bigpacific.com, because I was so intimidated by all these jolt-drinking uber-coders who just had to do the math with the tables. And then I had an epiphany: if there’s something plug-in that I can use, or a faster way to do this, or an application that enables my design-oriented mind instead of forcing me into being a ‘programmer’, why wouldn’t I use it? It was free to leverage the incredible talent of people writing java and javascript, cgi/perl, asp (If you don’t know those, good for you!). It was affordable to buy small plugins to my sites and instantly enable them into being ‘smart’/thinking/interactive sites instead of typical brochureware.

That’s why I love UniqueBlogDesigns.com. I’ve got two completely different experiences with these folks – one was for a totally custom blog creation, which you can see at http://www.bigpacific.com/wordpress/. It’s beautiful, functional, and incorporated a lot of cool things unique to my site – custom header development, incorporation of my Slideshowpro content, and a separate, slimmed down version of the template for inside pages.

The Citrus Theme from Unique Blog Designs

Click here to check out the great templates at Unique Blog Designs

The second time around, I chose to buy the Citrus Theme, pre-made, from UBD. It’s gorgeous, affordable, and comes in six colors and I can use it on as many sites as I like. Of course, I was spoiled by UBD’s design crew the first time around and now I’m likely signing up for the premium forum membership so I can get in and tweak backgrounds and link colors etc. for this site, which uses the beautiful lime-green version of citrus, very suitable to tech content.

Lush Arthemia Template from ColorLabsProject

The other theme I’m going to be working with next is Arthemia, from ColorLabsProject. I like this one because of the variety of colors, the strong use of icons/thumbnails, the simplicity and clean lines of the template. I plan to use this template for a blog about politics and volunteerism globally coinciding with Barack Obama’s election as US President. I think it’s a great ‘newsy’, community style look.

You can either hire techs from either company to install the theme for you, or you can follow the readme instructions and video tutorials, or call on the after-sales support and they’ll help walk you through it. Of course, if you want to get really comfortable working with your blog, you should really sign up for the BecomeaBlogger.com course!