WordPress Complete Tutorial 02: Your First WordPress Blog on WordPress.com
This is the second post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.
For all tutorials in this series, please visit:
I am going to guide you to register a free blog on WordPress.com today. We will use this blog as a testing blog, you can try out the power of WordPress with it.
WordPress.com is a blog service website run by the company behind WordPress, Automattic. They offer free and paid blog service powered by WordPress.
Register a Blog on WordPress.com
This is the homepage of WordPress.com, it shows latest posts on WordPress.com. You can select your language from the drop down box on the top right.:
To get our free blog, click on Get Started Here. You need to provide some information about your blog.
The first thing is to select your own domain, you can use a domain under WordPress.com for free, which is like: YourName.WordPress.com. Or you can register a .COM/.NET/.NET here. WordPress.com will host your both your domain and blog. It’s very convenient, you don’t need to worry about the setting of your domain. The only thing is that it’s a little bit expansive, $17 per year, usually a domain company charges for a price under $10.
Here we choose WordPress.com to get a free account. I use ZackLive.WordPress.com as my domain, and ZackLive for username. And then enter your password and email. You can select your language in the drop down box as well.
After clicking Sign Up button, a activate email will be sent to your email, you need to click the link in the mail to activate your blog:
You will be redirected to the Dashboard of your blog’s admin panel.
Dashboard of a WordPress Blog
Here you will see the basic information of your blog, like how many posts and comments on your blog. You can drag and drop to re-arrange the Dashboard, and you can select what to be showed in Screen Options on the top right.
The video provided by WordPress.com is the best way to understand the Dashboard.
Let’s check out our blog.
Your First WordPress Blog
You can visit your blog by clicking on My Blog on the top Admin Bar. Or directly type your URL in your browser, for my blog that will be zacklive.wordpress.com:
On the top of the page, you can see a Admin bar, that can only be seen by the owner of the blog. You can use it to go back to Dashboard or publish a new post quickly.
Right below the Admin bar is the blog Menu. We have two links, Home and About. You can change this in your admin panel(Appearance->Menus).
The big title, zacklive, is the name of my blog, and followed by a default slogan, “Just another WordPress.com site“. You can change these in your admin panel(Settings->General).
And here comes the post, you can see the post title(Hello World!), publish date and content. Post category is under the post.
There is a blank area at the bottom, that’s where sidebar is placed. There are usually three kinds of sidebars: Left, Right and Footer sidebar. For this theme, we have footer sidebar(at the bottom of the page), you can edit sidebars in admin panel as well(Appearance->Widgets).
Conclusion
So you have your first WordPress blog, you can try it out in Admin Panel.
In the next tutorial, I’ll show you how to work with themes to make your blog looks better.
If you’ve got any questions, feel free to talk to me via comment.
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