Introduction: Create a Free Wordpress Blog

By
About: College English instructor, book publisher, editor, and writer.

In my college technical and professional writing classes, I have my students create Wordpress blogs to use for a variety of in-class and collaborative writing/research assignments. In addition, these blogs function as a social media hub for students to start developing their online professional personae.

While this Instructable covers creating a Wordpress blog, additional Instructables will show how to incorporate other social media applications such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Statcounter, Klout, and bitly. So, for anyone who wants to quickly set up a Wordpress blog, this Instructable should work for you. In addition, for anyone who wants to use a Wordpress site to serve as an online clearinghouse for their professional activities, communications, and networking efforts, this Instructable and forthcoming ones on the subjects noted above should be useful as well.

Finally, if you're a student in one of my classes, once your blog is set up, you’ll need to write and publish an initial post introducing yourself. Then, when you’ve done that, email me a link to your blog’s home page at my email address on the class handout.

Step 1: Go to Wordpress.com

Go to Wordpress.com to set up your account.

Step 2: Registration Information

Enter your email address, username, password and blog address.

Because you're using this blog as the hub for your online professional persona, make your blog address your full name. For example,  johndoe.wordpress.com. However, if your name is already taken, try adding your middle name, such as johnroydoe.wordpress.com. If even this doesn’t work, try using mr or ms at the beginning of your name such as mrjohndoe or mrjohnroydoe.

(And make sure to choose the option for a free blog too!)

Step 3: Email Verification

At the next screen, go to the email account you used for your blog and select the link in the email from Wordpress to verify your account.

Step 4: Additional Blog Info

Once you click on the verification link in the email from Wordpress and it will take you back to the Wordpress site to enter more information about your blog.

I suggest you title your blog with your full name--after all, shameless online self promotion means you should put yourself front and center at all times--but you can choose something else if you'd like. You can also give your blog a tagline/subtitle but the default Wordpress taglines are pretty cheese-a-riffic.

Step 5: Choosing a Design Theme

Choose a theme. There are lots of free ones. You may choose whatever you like but, remember, as this site is meant to represent your professional self,  I'd skip themes with puppy dogs or kittens--or horses--unless you're going to be a vet. And maybe no themes with chainsaws unless you're going to be a licensed aborist . . . or zombie slayer.

Step 6: Social Sharing Settings

The next page you go to asks you to link your blog to Twitter and Facebook to increase potential traffic to it. If you’d like to link your blog to Facebook, go for it. However, even if you already have a personal Twitter account, don’t link it to your blog because I'll have another Instructable soon about creating a Twitter account for strictly professional use to link to your blog.

Step 7: Customizing Your Blog

Next, you will be prompted to customize your blog. This is a problematic screen that never seems to work quite right. You can customize your blog more effectively later on from the main blog dashboard so just skip this step right now and keep moving on.

Step 8: Your First Post

The next step will prompt you to make your first post. DO NOT DO THIS HERE! This quick post editor doesn’t work very well. (Or, to clarify, it's never worked well for me or my students in the past.) Just skip to the Finish button as you’ll want to get to your blog’s main dashboard to access the full post editor.

Step 9: Accessing the Full Post Editor

To get to the full post editor for your first post, choose My Blog from the top menu. Once again, avoid the quick post option on the upper right at all costs!

Step 10: Getting the to Full Post Editor

Select the "Create New Post" option to the right of your blog's name/title to get to the full-post editor.

Step 11: The Full Post Editor

You're now in the full post editor where you can title and where my students need to write their first posts. This post can be relatively brief . . . just a quick introduction about who you are and what you're studying. Once you are done, hit the publish button to the right.

Step 12: Viewing Your Post

After publishing your post, you can select your blog's name in the upper left hand corner which will take you to your blog's home page.

(Remember: If you're one of my technical/professional writing students, you need to email me the link to your blog's homepage now that you are done with its initial setup.)

Step 13: Want to Learn More?

Wordpress is a very powerful (but moderately complex) blogging platform. Sites where you can learn more once you have your blog set up include:

http://learn.wordpress.com/

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/

http://en.support.wordpress.com/

http://en.support.wordpress.com/apps/