Brand story

Welcome to the WordPress.com Brand Guide. Here, you’ll find the practices and principles we apply to the words and imagery we use to promote WordPress.com.

Inspired by you

We’re making the web a better place, one site at a time.

What we stand for

We democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world.

Who we are

WordPress.com is about telling your story, connecting with the world, and having the freedom to own your data on the web.

Our story begins in 2002, in Washington, D.C.

Eighteen-year-old Matt Mullenweg (now the CEO of Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company) built and maintained a popular photo website using open source software called cafelog. The software had become stagnant and he needed to find a different, better solution.

But no alternatives offered the collaboration, control, stability, and opportunity for rapid iteration that he so strongly believed in.

This belief led Matt to fork cafelog to start an open source project of his own (with project co-founder Mike Little). WordPress, the free, open source project, was released on May 27th, 2003 and has grown to democratize and revolutionize publishing.

WordPress, at its roots, is a community-based project.

Contributors from around the world write code, offer forum support to users, and educate users at worldwide WordCamps. But for it to become a tool anyone could use — even those without a technology background — required an extra step. Thus WordPress.com was born: the free, hosted service offered by Automattic as of November 21st, 2005. Just over a decade later, it is a leading web publishing platform, and home to tens of millions of sites, from single-author food blogs to major publications like TIME.

From its earliest days into the present, WordPress.com stands for community and innovation.

We re-invented WordPress.com’s interface in Calypso, an open source project which offers speed and aesthetics in a modern, JavaScript-based infrastructure. We foster numerous communities of bloggers and writers, business owners and freelancers, artists and designers. We provide tools and resources for our users to build their home on the web — and find their community along the way. WordPress.com’s global reach allows anyone, regardless of gender, income, or location, to tell their story and share it with the world, and to do it in dozens of languages. And Automattic — WordPress.com’s parent company — has maintained its open source ethos throughout its existence and is the largest contributor to the WordPress project, which powers 27% of all websites as of November 2016.

We care deeply about the success of our users, so we develop software that’s flexible enough to allow anyone to tell their stories through beautiful, multimedia-rich websites that work across platforms and screen sizes. It’s this commitment that has allowed us to cater to everyone from personal bloggers to Fortune 500 companies like Xerox, PlayStation, Microsoft, and The Walt Disney Company.

We strive to create good

What we believe

We believe that everyone has a story to tell — a unique perspective to offer the world. And we believe that everyone should be able to tell that story, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live.

We strive to bring people closer together. We recognize that we are more alike than we are different and that we all share a common desire to be heard. To be understood. To be valued. To be loved. To belong. 

WordPress.com gives voice to that which unites us across the world and celebrates our differences so that we may learn from each other and grow.       

Our core values are summed up by the Automattic Creed, a set of tenets that guide our daily work and pursuit of our purpose:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

Further, we believe that nothing is perfect — we learn more and more each day from our users and each other about how we can improve our products and make the web a better place. Our community of WordPress users holds us accountable to our purpose and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Next up: Brand voice