How to Create a Free Wordpress Blog

WordPress provides two distinctly different blog plans. Free WordPress blogs are provided by WordPress.com and they are the topic of this tutorial. A free WordPress blog has a limited number of themes and widgets from which to choose, the CSS stylesheet (formatting) cannot be changed, and neither advertisements nor Google analytics are allowed. But you can't beat the price!

Amply-featured blogs can be purchased from WordPress.org. In addition to paying for the blog each year, you must also obtain your own website domain.

By the way, for help on any feature that we do not cover in detail, go to support.wordpress.com and enter the applicable keyword.

Create Your Blog

Go to wordpress.com. In the upper right corner, click Sign up now.
On the next page, enter a Username, password, and email address. The Username you choose will be your Blog Domain. For example, if you choose username johndoe, your blog URL is johndoe.wordpress.com. Complete the information and click Next.
The next page will confirm your Domain and let you enter a blog title - which will display in the header. When finished, click Signup. WordPress will send you an email.
Login into your email account, open the email from WordPress, and click the activation link. A window will appear saying that your account is now active.
Click Login and enter your Username and password. You are now on the Dashboard. Notice the tabs on the left sidebar. Many of the tabs have secondary tabs. To view them, hover the cursor over the tab and click on the down arrow to the right.
Click Visit Site in the upper left corner. You'll probably want to choose a new look for your blog. Make your browser window wide enough so you will not have to scroll horizontally.

Now we will customize the blog and enter all required information and settings. Find the set of tabs at the bottom of the sidebar and click on the Appearance tab.

Customize Your Blog

There are three sections of tabs on the left sidebar. The lowest section contains the pages that will allow you to customize your blog.

Appearance

Themes

When you click Appearance, you begin on the Themes page where you will choose what your blog will look like. Click the dropdown arrow under Available Themes to filter the selection if there is one characteristic you really want; i.e. a custom header. Then click Filter. You will be entering a blog title and tagline later. Many themes do not display the tagline, so find a theme that does if having a tagline is important to you.

Click Preview to view the theme, and then click in the dark area outside of the preview window to close it. To choose a theme you are previewing, click Activate in the upper right corner. You can change your theme later, but you may have to redo some settings.

Your Current Theme is now displayed at the top of the dashboard, along with the theme's customization options. The options are also displayed on the sidebar under Appearance.

Widgets

If your theme supports widgets, click the Widgets option. You now see the available widgets on the left, and your blank sidebar on the right. Drag a widget over to Sidebar to add it to your blog sidebar. Click the down arrow to the right of the widget name to see its settings. You can drag and drop the widgets to change their order on the sidebar. Popular widgets are Recent Posts, Archives, and Categories - if you plan to label your posts.

Extras

This page allows you to activate mShots. If someone provides a website link in Comments, mShots will display a small image of the website when you hover over its link.

Custom Header

If applicable, click the Custom Header option. Some themes let you upload an image from your computer for the header. If so, the dimensions of the image will be given. If you upload an image with different dimensions, you will be asked to crop the image. You may also have options to show/hide the blog title and tagline, and font color.

Edit CSS

This feature is rather useless as you cannot save any changes you make - only preview them. It is a teaser to entice you to pay the upgrade fee that allows you to modify the CSS stylesheet or create a stylesheet of your own.

Users

Now click the Users tab. The following subcategories are found under Users.

Authors & Users

If you plan to share your blog with someone, add their email and role here.

Your Profile

WordPress only requires a nickname and email address, and the email address should not display on your blog. Other information you enter may display depending on the theme you choose. In the Personal Options section, stay with the default settings - unless you want to change the Admin Color Scheme.

In the Name section, your Username is grayed out because it is your login ID and cannot be changed. Type in a Nickname. Your Nickname will display on your posts and in comments you add to others’ posts. If your nickname is John Doe, your posts will be signed “Posted by John Doe.” In the Contact Info section, your email address should be prefilled.

Invites

Once you have customized your blog and posted some blog topics, you can use this page to send an invitation to your friends to view your blog.

Tools

The options on the Tools tab are best left for more experienced WordPress users, so we won't discuss them here.

Settings

The final customization options can be found under the Settings tab.

General Settings

The General Settings page displays first. Enter a blog title and tagline. The tagline does not display in many themes.

The Blog Picture will be your favicon - a small image that displays to the left of the URL in the browser. If you upload an image from your computer, it should be 128 x 128 pixels square.

The time zone UTC applies to London time and is displayed to the right. Select the number of hours that your time zone falls ahead or behind London time. For instance, for EST of the U.S., choose UTC-5. Then select the format for times and dates. The Week Starts On setting is only applicable if you plan to use a calendar widget on your blog. Let it default to Monday for now. Click Save Changes before moving to another tab under Settings!

Writing and Reading

Click the Writing tab on the left sidebar, and keep the default settings until you are more experienced. Click the Reading tab. Keep the default for the first three settings. If at a later time you want your Front page to display a unique page you have created instead of your latest blog post, you can come back and specify it here. If you plan on using Feeds, you can specify settings for your feeds on this page. For novice users, take the default and then learn about Feeds at a later time. Click Save Changes.

Discussion and Media

Specify how you want to handle comments on the Discussion tab. Keep the default settings until people are leaving comments on your blog posts and you have some experience dealing with them. Don’t change any settings on the Media tab at this time.

Privacy

If you want to make your blog private for a time until you can customize it and get a few blogs posted, click the last option, visible only to users I choose. Click Save Changes, type your Username in the box provided, and click Save Changes again.

Delete Blog, OpenID, and Domains

You should not have to change any settings on these last three tabs under Settings.

The Dashboard Tabs

Briefly notice the tabs underneath Dashboard at the top section of the sidebar. Blog Stats reports the number of visitors to your blog. If you comment on other people’s blog posts while logged in to your WordPress account, you can view your comments by clicking My Comments. If you will have multiple blogs, you can manage them by clicking My Blogs. The other tabs are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Blog Content Tabs

Now let’s discuss the tabs in the middle section of the sidebar that pertain to the content of your blog posts. And let's create our first blog post! (You can delete it later.)

Posts

Click the Posts tab and click Add New. Type a post title in the space provided, and then type about 20 words in the text-entry box below. Make sure the Visual tab is chosen and notice the icons at the top that provide for bold, italics, lists, centering text, etc.

Above the text-entry box, find "Upload/Insert," and hover the cursor over the icons to see the type of media you can insert into your blog. Click the Image icon and upload a small image from your computer.

Click the HTML tab if you like to format with HTML. Below the text-entry box are options for Excerpt and Trackbacks. See WordPress Help for more information on these options when you are more experienced. Check “Allow comments on this post” if desired.

On the right side of the page are options for adding tags or categories to your blog. When finished, click Preview. Then click Publish. To view your blog, click Visit Site at the top. To return to the Dashboard, click My Dashboards at the top. If you have multiple blogs enabled, hover the cursor over My Dashboards and choose the desired blog name.

Media

All media files you have inserted into blog posts will be listed here. If you uploaded an image in the step above, you will see it listed. Hover the cursor over the image name to see the options to view, edit, or delete. There is a 3.0 GB limit for media files on a free blog, so delete any unused files.

Links

Below the Post tab is the Links tab. Many bloggers provide for their readers a list of their favorite blogs or websites. First you must add the Links Widget to your blog sidebar. Then click this tab to add, delete, and categorize your links.

Pages

Depending on the theme, you may be able to create additional blog pages; such as an About Me page. The link to the page may be on the blog sidebar, or on a tab at the top of the blog. Click Pages to add and delete these pages.

Comments

Here is where you view, edit, delete, reject, and approve the comments others have posted to your blog posts.

Ratings and Polls

The PollDaddy Rating widget may be available on your blog theme. This enables you to place rating widgets on your blog posts, pages and comments. To create polls on your website, you must have a separate account with PollDaddy.

We hope you are now a published WordPress.com blogger. Good luck!

Other Free Blog Service

Google's Blogger (blogger.com) is the other free blogging service on the Internet. Blogger has a nice variety of templates to choose from. Their interface is not as slick as Wordpress.org, but they allow for a lot more customization as bloggers can change the blog's HTML. Also, bloggers can monetize their blog if approved by Google. For more information, please see our tutorial Creating a Blogger Blog: the Essential Guide.

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