Getting Started with WordPress.com

Many of you probably know that WordPress is a very popular blogging provider. There are 2 versions of WordPress, which I’ve covered in a previous post, and today I want to talk about getting started with the free, hosted version – WordPress.com

Setting up a blog with WordPress.com is quite easy, but getting used to the blog interface can take a little longer. Firstly, go to www.wordpress.com and set up an account, which you’ll need to verify by email. You’ll be asked to name your blog at this point too. Once your account is active, then log in and this is where you can start to customize it.

The first thing you’ll want to do is choose a template. WordPress’s default template is quite plain and others may be more suitable to match the colours of your branding or just find a template that’s more fun. To find a template, navigate to ‘Appearance’ and ‘Themes’ and you’ll find a good selection to choose from. When you find one you like, activate it and it’ll go live immediately.

Once you’re got your new theme, you can customize it with ‘widgets’ (which I’ve also previously covered in a post) to include information you’d like visitors to your blog to see, for example, archives of posts, post categories, links to other blogs and perhaps even a calendar. You can try out different widgets to see what you like and don’t like – you can put them up and take them down whenever you like.

Before you start posting, check you’re happy with the blog settings in the ‘settings’ option in the left hand menu. Here you can change the name of your blog and add your own tagline. Go through all of the settings options to make sure they’re set correctly and particularly check the defaults for the ‘discussion’ option to make sure you can moderate any comments before they are live on your blog.

When you’ve checked the main settings, then start blogging. WordPress will add a sample blog post, comment and page which you can delete and start your own. I’ll be covering more blogging tips in another post, but until now, happy blogging!