In a recent episode of WordPress Weekly, I discussed with Ryan Hellyer on why anyone would use WordPress.com for a serious blog or venture. In my opinion, if someone were serious about their project, they would get their own domain, hosting, etc and do it all themselves. However, I came across a post by StartupGeek.org which ended up explaining a cool idea on how to use WordPress.com to host a user guide.
I started looking into online help systems around the open source ecosystem. It seemed that everything I found was either overly complex or required time from my development & system administration team.
As my frustration level grew I realized that WordPress was a solution I could use. With WordPress.com I didn’t need technical help from my overloaded developer team. I didn’t need any training since I already know the application from blogging. And of course, the price is just right for a start-up company.
I think this was a great idea on the part of David Abramowski, one I wouldn’t have thought about myself since I consider WordPress.com to be all about blogging. Obviously, it’s not.
I really agree & look at WP (self-install and .com) as a web publishing platform / tool, not (just) a blogging software or “a blog”. You can really use it for any collection of information especially non-tabular text. Announce a single event. Write a user guide. Post your recipes. Document a season of a sports team, or maybe even a site celebrating 1 particular winning event. List all the movies you’ve seen, or review each one in a post. Publish the lyrics from your band’s new album (each song is a post). Set up a site giving tips on a particular narrow topic, like a How To for something you learned. WP.com can be really easy to set up a micro-website for any discrete topic, that maybe doesn’t fit inside your other blog(s), but just to stand on its own as a public website, a resource. It puts basic publishing ability in the hands of people almost as easy as email or posting on a forum, but your audience is potentially so much larger to reach the public & get into Google by setting up a WP for it, so that people can find your information when they wish to search for it, instead of the more limited number of people receiving the information through a push method like email or forum posting where it sinks away with time.
Just some late thoughts. Good post topic Jeffro. I haven’t commented here on WP Tavern in a minute but I try to keep up with all the WP Weekly episodes & commend you on this work.