WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. Open source WordPress has been incredibly successful and risen from a handful of users to the most-used blog tool in its category. However, as easy-to-use as we could make the open source package, there was still a barrier in that it requires a hosting account, a database, FTP, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms that make normal people like you and me dizzy.

We wanted to bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience. So we created WordPress.com, a hosted version of the open source package where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge. We’re a bit of an underdog, as there are much larger hosted blogging services such as Blogger that have been out for years, but when WordPress.org got started people said the blog software market was saturated and there wasn’t room for anything new. (The big players then were Greymatter and Movable Type.) We think we have something unique to bring to the table.

The following is a list of some of the features that come standard with WordPress, however there are literally hundreds of plugins that extend what WordPress does, so the actual functionality is nearly limitless. You are also free to do whatever you like with the WordPress code, extend it or modify in any way or use it for commercial projects without any licensing fees. That is the beauty of free software, free meaning not only price but also the freedom to have complete control over it.