You can get a blog started in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. All you need is an email address and a name. You can blog as much as you want for free, your blog can be public to the world or private for just your friends, and our paid upgrades are completely optional.

You can change the look of your blog with over 60 attractive themes ranging from professional to fun to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button. Each theme allows you to customize your sidebar using widgets, and several themes let you upload your own photo or image for the header bar. We add themes regularly based on user requests. If you´re a CSS pro, you can also customize your CSS code.

WordPress.com includes an easy system which allows you to categorize and tag your posts while you write them. We automatically create archives based on your categories and add them to our global tag system and our tag surfer, so you get extra traffic as other people interested in the same topics as you will find your post and leave comments on your blog.

Our built-in rich text editor makes it easy to create great looking posts. You can upload your own photos or easily include images from other services like Flickr or Photobucket. You can even embed videos from places like YouTube or Google. To keep you from looking too silly, we include an inline spell-checker that makes it easy to proof your posts. We also have a preview feature that shows you exactly what your post or page will look like before you publish them for the world to see. Finally we know how frustrating it can be to lose hours of hard work, so every minute when you´re writing a post we save it to the server to keep your post safe in case your computer crashes or something else happens.

We have an integrated stats system which gives you up-to-the-minute stats on how many people are visiting your blog, where they´re coming from, which posts are most popular, and which search engine terms are sending people to your blog.

WordPress.com uses Akismet, the world´s best comment and trackback spam technology. It blocks spammers from leaving spam comments on your blog (we block over 1,000 spam comments a day for some of our bloggers!). Akismet also helps us shut down spam blogs that try to sneak onto WordPress.com (so your blog won´t be in the same community as some Viagra touting site). If a spam comment or blog slips through, you can report them and help get them blocked from the system.

WordPress.com allows you to have a completely public blog, a blog which is public but not included in search engines or our public listings, or a private blog which only members can access. If you want a public blog, but only occasionally post something private, we have a per-post password option, too!