WordPress powers over 30% of the web,
making it the most popular
content management system
in the world.
But between the need to
choose hosting, buy a domain,
and set up the rest of your site,
it could be costly and time consuming.
Luckily, with WordPress.com,
you can sign up
for an account and have
a website in minutes.
And the best part?
It's completely free.
In this video, we're going to show you
how to set up a great-looking free blog
using WordPress.com with no steps skipped.
Let's get started.
The first thing we're
going to do is navigate
to WordPress.com and click
on the Get Started button.
You might notice that
there is a Compare plans
button as well, and while
there are paid accounts
on WordPress.com, we're
going to be signing up
with the free for life plan.
First we'll be asked some questions
about the website we want to create.
We'll name the site Joe's Tech Blog,
and then we'll be asked the topic.
You can see when we
start typing the topic,
we'll be given suggestions.
I'm going to choose technology.
Finally, we'll be asked
what the primary goal
for our website is.
We can choose from share
ideas, to promote our business,
or showcase our portfolio.
Since we're creating a
blog, we're going to choose
share ideas.
Then we'll click Continue.
Now we want to give our site an address.
So I'll type in some keywords,
and WordPress.com will
make some suggestions
for premium domains that we can get
or other domains we can purchase.
It'll also make the
suggestion on a free domain.
You can see that joestechblog
is pretty common,
as a number is affixed to the end of it,
so let's try to pick
something that's more unique.
You can see if I use my last
name with the word tech,
we can get a free WordPress.com domain,
so we're going to go
ahead and choose that,
and then we'll be presented with the plan
that's best for us.
And when you're ready to
take your blog or website
to the next level, you
can upgrade at any time,
but for now, we're going
to choose the free plan.
We'll put in our email address.
Our user name will be
the domain that we chose
on the last screen, and then
we'll choose a password.
And our account will be set up.
At this point, you should get an email
to confirm your account.
So go ahead and log into your email,
and click Confirm Now.
Once you confirm your
account, you'll be brought
to a dashboard with a
checklist of things you can do
to continue configuring your website.
You can see that we've already completed
three of these steps.
We've created our site, we
picked a website address,
and we updated our site title.
The rest of this stuff
is actually optional,
so we can choose whether
or not we want to do it.
We don't need to upload
a site icon right now,
and we may not have one
ready, so we're going to
skip over this.
We are going to create the tagline though
because we can help peak readers' interest
with a little bit more
detail about the site.
So we'll click Do It, and then we will
add the site title.
Now we'll click Save Settings
and return to the checklist.
We'll also upload our profile picture
to personalize our
website a little bit more.
So we'll navigate to where our photos are.
Once our photo is uploaded, we can choose
to crop it into a square, so we'll pick
the best square part of the photo,
and then we'll click Change My Photo.
It will get uploaded,
and it will be public.
While it uploads, we might
as well add more information
here, like our first and last name.
And if you want to put a
little bit of a bio here,
you can choose to do that too.
We'll also change the
public display name to Joe,
instead of our user name.
We'll click Save these Details.
And once all of our information is saved
and our photo is uploaded, we can go back
to our checklist.
I did this by hitting the
back button in the browser,
which is the easiest way to
get back to this checklist.
Once we're back to the
checklist, we can actually
choose to ignore these
last three steps for now.
Yes, we'll want to choose a contact page
and of course write our first blog post,
but there are a few things
we need to do to finish
configuring our website.
For example, on the left
hand side under Personalize,
we can click Customize
to choose the theme.
WordPress has chosen the
Independent Publisher 2 theme
for us.
While this is a good theme,
we want to try to find
something a little bit different.
Here's how.
You can see that we're
presented with a number
of different themes to choose
from, both paid and free.
We're going to want to
filter these a little bit
to make searching them
easy, so I'm going to click
on Creating a Site for
a Blog, and I'm going to
choose only free themes here.
There are a few really nice
themes, and even better,
the easy to use themes are
labeled with the Beginner tab.
Now we're still given
a lot of choices here,
and that could be a
little bit overwhelming.
If you're not sure
which one that you like,
you could always click on the three dots
to see a live demo, and
here you'll get a good idea
of the look and feel of your new theme.
Or you can click on the Info
button to see everything
that the theme has to offer.
Once you find one that
you like, you can click
the three dots again
to activate the theme,
and then once it's activated,
you can click Customize Site.
Now I really like the Lovecraft theme,
and that's the theme
that we're going to use
for this video.
But we are going to see
how we can customize it
a little bit.
And there are two ways for us to do that.
We can click the Customize
button that we see up top.
Or if you want to
customize your theme later,
you can click on Customize
under the Personalize heading.
Now the customizer is
going to be different
depending on the theme
that you have enabled,
but in general, it allows
you to make changes
to your website in realtime
and your website updates
so you can see those changes in realtime.
Don't worry though.
If you're just playing
around, none of those changes
will go live until you
hit the Publish button.
So for the Lovecraft theme,
we can do some things
like change the colors and background.
WordPress.com even makes
some palettes available to us
which are predetermined color
schemes that we can choose
for our websites.
I'm a fan of this featured
palette with the light green,
so I'm going to go ahead
and click that one.
We're also given the
opportunity to change fonts
and header images, and
even make some changes
to our content option.
I would encourage you to
get into the customizer
and start playing with everything
that is available to you.
But with our colors and
backgrounds changed,
we're going to click the Publish button.
Once it's published, we'll X out of that,
and now that we have a
custom theme, we can go ahead
and view the site.
You can see that the site
still shows up within the frame
of the WordPress dashboard here,
but we can fully interact
with the site the way we want.
And now with our theme
chosen, let's start populating
our content.
Our homepage includes the default post
that WordPress.com blogs
come installed with
and a contact page that's
been pre-populated for us.
In order to view and add more blog posts,
you can click on Blog Posts under Manage,
and you'll be brought to a
list of all of your published
and drafted blog posts.
We're going to get rid
of the first, or default,
blog post, and then we
can click on Add New
to add our own.
Once we do that, our dashboard will change
to an editor experience,
and the first time
we open the editor, we'll
be given some Tool Tips
to walk us through the process
of creating our first post.
Once we go through all the
Tool Tips, we're going to start
adding our content, so we'll add a title,
My Thoughts on the iPhone,
and then we will add
our content.
So we can start typing our content here.
We have a simple visual editor bar
where we can bold text and add links,
and we can choose to upload
media like images or audio.
With our content populated,
we'll add a new category,
and we'll call that
Phones and Mobile Devices,
and then we'll add some tags,
iPhones, IOS, Mobile, Cell.
We can also choose to
upload a featured image,
so we'll click that button,
and then we'll click Add New.
We'll be given the
opportunity to upload an image
from our computer, and
once that's uploaded,
we can set featured image.
You can see that it shows
up above our title here
in the WordPress.com editor.
The rest of the options
are for related blog posts
activities, like sharing.
We can do things like connect our Facebook
or Twitter account in order
to automatically share.
We can change the slug,
which is the blog post URL,
the end of that.
And we can add a location
and excerpt, and choose
to turn off comments and track backs.
Ping backs and track
backs are when other blogs
or websites link to our blog posts,
they'll get listed in the comment section.
And if we're happy with
that, we can go ahead
and click Publish.
Once our blog post is
created and we go back
to the blog post screen,
we can see that we have
a brand new published post.
Creating pages works a lot in the same way
as creating a blog post, so
if we click on Site Pages,
you'll see that we've got two pages.
This is our blog post page
which we can't modify,
and the content page, which we can.
We can also create a new page if we want,
and we're brought to an editor that looks
exactly the same as the blog post editor.
So if you want to do something like create
an About page, you can do that here.
You'll notice that the settings
are also slightly different.
We do have Status and Featured Image,
so we can add a Featured
Image for our pages as well.
And then we do have
Sharing and more options,
but we also have Page Attributes.
We don't necessarily
need either one of these
when managing the content of our blog.
So once we have our page content in place,
we'll go ahead and click Publish.
Before we go, we should take a look
at the Configure settings
on the left hand side.
So as mentioned before,
we can click Sharing
to connect our social media accounts
like Facebook, Twitter, and more.
We can also add other authors to our blog,
so if we want to have
more than one writer,
we can do that.
And then, we have some premium features.
So if I click Plugins,
you'll see that we can look
at the Plugins that are available to us,
but we can't install
them unless we upgrade
to the business plan.
So this is something to
consider during the life
of your WordPress.com blog.
If you want to continue to have it free,
you can do that for life,
but if you want to do things
like have a custom domain
or install Plugins,
you're going to need to
upgrade to a paid plan.
The same thing goes with domains.
Again, we can add a domain and register it
right from WordPress.com.
However, we will need to upgrade
to a premium plan for that.
Finally, under Settings,
we'll find some information
about our blog, like
the title and tagline,
the site icon that we
talked about earlier,
and the timezone.
I would recommend setting the
timezone to your timezone,
and you can do that either
by using the UTC offsets,
or by picking a city
that is closest to yours.
So I am on the East Coast
of the United States,
so I am going to find
New York in this list,
and now my timezone is set.
This is important for
publishing to your website.
When you publish a blog
post, the published time will
be set using the site timezone.
I would also encourage you to take a look
at the rest of this information.
Another nice feature of WordPress.com
is that if you want to move
to a WordPress.org site
where you do set up your
own hosting and domain,
you can do that by exporting
your data and taking it
anywhere you like.
So we're going to go ahead
and save these settings.
That's it for this video.
We now have a free WordPress.com blog,
where we've added our first blog post,
a custom page, and managed
some of the settings.
I encourage you to look at
the rest of the settings,
explore the themes and other options,
and really make your
WordPress.com blog your own.
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