Support/Sales

  • forewasabi · Member ·

    I’m a potential customer and I need to talk to someone at WP to see if this will be suitable for my needs. Is there an email address or a phone number I can connect with?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • timethief · Member ·

    This is a peer support forum where Volunteers and Staff work cooperatively to deliver WordPress.com support. There is no phone support here and we Volunteers do not provide support by email.

    Volunteers answer most questions posted into forum threads and Staff monitor. When Volunteers cannot provide the required support we flag threads for Staff attention.

    See here for details of all 3 plans http://store.wordpress.com/bundles/

    Note that none of the plans allow you to run advertising or to upload your own themes or plugins. WordPress.com blogs cannot be equipped for eCommerce transactions. If you need a site that requires a custom theme or plugins — e.g., if you want to be able to sell things directly from your site, or if you want to install discussion forums — a self-hosted WordPress site might be right for you.

    Upgrades are also available for individual purchase on a per blog basis. With the exception of the Guided Transfer, all upgrades are per year and per blog. You will find the relevant links to available upgrades here. http://en.support.wordpress.com/upgrades/

  • forewasabi · Member ·

    Can you tell me what the difference between the bundles shown and a self-hosted Word Press site? What does self hosted mean?

  • timethief · Member ·

    You can read this comparison > http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

    Self hosted actually means you hire a web hosting company http://wordpress.org/hosting to keep your site online. Aside from that and you are on your own in all other things when it comes to site management. There are support forums for WordPress.org software but there is no hand holding support or Staff like there is here.

    For self-hosting figure an average monthly total cost (including cost of a domain name) of about $10 to $25 generally, but that all depends on storage and bandwidth requirements. You will be responsible for all upgrades, installations, backups and troubleshooting. If you install a theme or a plugin that negatively affects your blog, then you have to figure out what went wrong and fix it.

  • timethief · Member ·

    Bottom line: If you are not an experienced WordPress.com blogger tackling self hosting may prove to be a situation that overfaces and overwhelms you.

    Most bloggers I know that take this route to make money via advertising do not make up for their annual web hosting, domain registration and associated costs, and with literally millions of people downloading and installing Adblock plus on their Firefox browsers each month, fewer and fewer people are seeing ads.

    The second most typical reason to move to self hosting is to be able to upload plugins and themes. It’s my not humble opinion, given my own experience, that there are many dodgy plugins out there that will bring your blog down and the plugin developers will not help you bring it back up again. It’s also my experience that there are many free themes with hidden links in footers and in text that can have a crippling affect on your site. More to the point is the fact that readers can to read high quality content and those who become obsessed with twiddling and tweaking themes are rarely skilled writers.

  • timethief · Member ·

    readers can to read = readers come to read

  • forewasabi · Member ·

    Thank you for your help. I have one more question. I have a website for Autoracing, http://www.racefansforever.com on another provide, with which I am extremely unhappy. Anyway, my site get updated almost every day. It has more than one hundred individual pages for columns, and that number will grow almost daily as long as the site is in operation. There are multiple writers with multiple pages of articles. Some of the articles have images, some have videos most are just text. But if I could ask you, would you be able to look at my current site via the address above, and let me know if I would be able to replicate that, or something reasonably close to it, using WordPress, and if so, which bundle would you recommend. I know I’m asking a lot, but there is a lot riding on this, and I need to make the correct decision.
    Thanks!

  • timethief · Member ·

    I would not recommend any WordPress.com bundle for that site. Throwing money at this will not change a single thing.

  • forewasabi · Member ·

    I guess I’m not sure I understand. I feel like my site is fairly basic. You don’t think I could recreate it using WP instead of WEBS? I’ve seen a few other sites which seem a lot more complex than mine, such as http://www.frontstretch.com and http://stockcar.racersreunion.com/, and I know they are using WP, I just don’t know which bundle and if it is self hosted, etc.

    Thanks,

    Jim

  • timethief · Member ·

    http://www.frontstretch.com/ is not a free hosted WordPress.com blog. It’s hosted by Unified Layer

    stockcar.racersreunion.com is not a free hosted WordPress.com blog. it’s hosted by Ning

  • iamdiogo · Member ·

    Hi Jim,

    I don’t think you’ll be able to replicate your site with any standard WordPress.com bundle. Your best bet would be using a self-hosted WP installation, and you would need the help of a design/developer to create a custom theme for you.

    Additionally, I’m don’t think the sites you mention use WordPress.

    Hope it helps.

    – Diogo

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