Creating a New Wordpress.com Site

Creating a new site is simple: Go to http://wordpress.com and click on the button.

This is the visible address of your site and should reflect what the site will

be about.

This will be your single WordPress username, no

matter how many sites you create.

Choose a good password that WordPress ranks as

‘strong’.

NOTE: The blog address and username must be unique to

the entire WordPress site. This screen will not let you

proceed if either is already in use.

Creating a new site (continued):

A confirmation email will be sent to this email

address. You will need to click a link in the email to

activate your account.

Complete the initial site creation by clicking here.

Creating a new site (continued):

Fill in your name for your WordPress profile. This will be publicly visible.

You may optionally write something about yourself.

Remember, this is for your WordPress account,

no matter how many individual sites you

create.

Creating a new site (continued): Once you click on the

confirmation link in your email, you will be taken to this introductory screen.

You can verify anytime that you are logged in by

checking the top right corner of the screen.

By clicking on the My Blogs tab, you can begin setting up your new site.

Creating a new site (continued):

This is the site we just created. If we were to create additional sites,

they would each be listed on this screen.

Notice that our new site already contains one

page and one comment. These are automatically

created for all new Wordpress sites.

To manage an individual site, we click on the

Dashboard link beneath its listing.

Creating a new site (continued):

We’re going to jump right into setting up our new site, so

click on Hide This Screen to remove the shaded area.

The shaded section is for new WordPress users

and offers resources and shortcuts.

WordPress has an online “Zero to Hero” guide to

help beginners learn how to better set up and

manage their sites. You may wish to bookmark

this and visit it later.

Introducing the Dashboard:

We will be working with many different parts of this dashboard later in the course. Right now, let’s explore the Settings area.

This is the main dashboard screen, where

we can manage all aspects of our site. This interface is considered

the “back end” of our site, while what is visible to

the public is known as the “front end.”

This is the main navigation menu and is organized logically by

function.

The dashboard components can be

rearranged by clicking and dragging their title

bars.

The General Settings Screen:

Set the Timezone setting to match your area. This will

affect all times displayed on both the front and back ends

of your site.

The Site Title is what visitors to your site will see in very prominent letters. Give it some

thought before deciding.

The Tagline is a brief sentence or phrase that further describes what your site is all about.

This will also be one of the first things visitors to

your site will view.

The Privacy Settings Screen:

A final option is to mark the site Private. This means that only the specific WordPress users we specify will be able to view our site.

With the Site Visibility setting, we can decide who can view our site.

“Allow search engines” is the default setting and

means that whatever we write on our site will be

indexed by Google, Yahoo, and Bing and

available to come up in search results.

Since our new site is just for practice, let’s request that search engines not index our content. It will still be accessible on the internet, however, either

by typing in the URL directly or by using a link.

Viewing Our Live Website:

We can also view our site anytime by going directly to the site URL. In our example site,

that would be:

http://yourfirstsite.wordpress.com

We haven’t posted any content yet, but let’s take

a look at how our new site looks so far.

From any place in the Dashboard, we can view

our live website by clicking on the name of the site in the top left

corner.

Remember, this was the Blog Address we chose on the very first signup screen.

Our New Website:

This is the “Hello World!” post automatically created by

WordPress as a temporary placeholder for our site

content. In our next lesson, we will replace this with our

own content.

Here is the Tagline we wrote in the General

Settings page.

And here is the Site Title from the General Settings

page.

It certainly isn’t pretty, but this is the website we just

created!

Here is the Tagline we wrote in the General

Settings page.

It certainly isn’t pretty, but this is the website we just

created!

Here is the Tagline we wrote in the General

Settings page.

It certainly isn’t pretty, but this is the website we just

created.