WordPress.com offers a lot of features to their users at a small price each year. You can get extra storage, CSS options and ad removal each with their own fee. The question I have to ask is are these features, all added together, worth the price? Or would someone looking to expand their blog with more customization be better off finding their own web hosting package and using the open source WordPress.org software to run their blog?

Here’s a breakdown of the WordPress.com premium features:

Your Own Domain – You can have your WordPress.com blog run by their service but using your own domain for $10/year. That’s the same fee for that same price by yourself or you can use WordPress.com’s domain register for an extra $15/year.

Extra Storage – All WordPress.com accounts come with 3GB of storage but you can expand that storage in blocks of 5GB. So for an extra 5G you’d pay $20/year, 15GB for $50/year and 25GB for $90/year. Any web host worth their weight can offer you similar space options for equal or lower prices.

Custom CSS – You can gain the ability to customize your own CSS on your blog for $15/year. With WordPress.org this is obviously free.

Go Ad-Free – For $30/year, WordPress.com will stop running their ads on your blog. Let’s think about this for a second. A small blog probably doesn’t even generate $30/year in revenue for WordPress.com when the ads run normally. This is a huge win for WordPress.com in most cases.

Final Verdict

If you host a blog on WordPress.com and are considering upgrading to any of these premium features I strongly, strongly suggest you think twice. For much less money you can find quality web hosting that will give you even more benefits than what WordPress.com can offer you.

Now that I’ve had a chance to use the 2.7 release of WordPress for a few weeks on all of my blogs I think I’m ready to render a verdict, so to speak, on the latest version.

Overall I really, really like 2.7. I was a huge fan of the previous update to the admin but the newer version in 2.7 even blows that one away. Things were stepping in the right direction before but now the admin for WordPress makes it all feel like real, professional software and not some user interface monstrosity that is so common in the Open Source scene.

The other big improvement, and one I haven’t even had a chance to try yet, is the ability to update the WordPress install without using FTP. This has been available for updating plugins for quite some time but updating the core software was never an option. This will be a huge feature for people like myself who have multiple blogs and found it to be a pain to update their WordPress install after each major release.

It’s time for another website designer spotlight. This time around I’m going to talk about 9th sphere, a leader in Toronto website design. 9th sphere sets themselves apart from other website solutions firms in the region by offering more than just simple design services. They have an expanded set of client offerings including building web applications, Internet marketing, web consulting and domain name and hosting solutions.

Since this is a blog about design and development I thought I’d take a look at their web application services a little more closely. 9th sphere offers a multitude of web application types for their clients. They have a strong focus on ecommerce (a topic near and dear to our hearts here) and offer shopping cart and catalog web apps. The shopping carts and catalogs run on custom-built content management systems and, in the case of the cart, come with standard security layers and credit card processing integration.

Canadian businesses looking to build a new website utilizing best practices or expand upon their current one should consider contacting 9th sphere and seeing what they can do to help. From simple website design to more elaborate web applications and Internet Marketing, 9th sphere has the tools and abilities necessary to make your project a reality.

Since this is a blog focused on WordPress it’s not surprising that the topic of open source web design is near and dear to our hearts. For those of you interested in building web applications and sites but don’t have the keen design eye you feel you need the option of using an open source web layout is certainly a viable solution.

Many people who are experts in website development are prone to relying on themselves for everything. When this includes your site’s design there’s a good chance you might end up with an unattractive product. No matter how good it is behind-the-scenes, people won’t use or visit your site if it doesn’t look good.

With Open Source web design, there are thousands of pre-made layouts and templates available for free online that you can use in your projects. This way you can ensure your site or application looks good even if you aren’t a designer yourself. Most Open Source designers ask that you leave a simple link in the footer of the template giving attribution and credit to the author. That’s the only price you’d have to pay to instantly have a site design up and running that is of high quality.

Many people underestimate the work of any software development company. Today more and more companies of custom software which will meet the requirements of every customer.

Only imagine that your company has many offices which are situated all over the world. This is great because you try to reduce costs and thus increase profit. But in this case you can face serious problems connected with control of their work. It would be not an easy task to estimate the results of their work. But there is a very simple solution of that problem which seems to be obvious for everyone. You can install web based collaboration software which gives a possibility to solve this problem by increasing the overall control of the company.

One of the main advantage of this particular kind of software is that it gives a possibility to control the work of every manager online with the help of internet thus you can follow the work on the task in progress and of course make corrections if that is required. Also another advantage of this collaboration software is that you can estimate the work of every manager because his salary is connected with the number of the tasks that he has done. As you see you can easily connect all your offices working in different parts of the world