Create a free website with Wordpress.com

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Category: Opinion

Published on Sunday, 01 September 2013 23:56

Written by Christian Dunn

You have finally decided you need a website. This could be for your business, your sports team or yourself. You don't have the time, money or expertise to need to worry about your own web server or hosting and you are not even sure whether you should buy a domain name. 

There is one easy solution, Wordpress.com.

In this article I am going to show you how easy it is to get started by setting up your own wordpress site and provide you with the fundamentals on how Wordpress works.

Getting Started

So the first step is to sign up. Create an account with Wordpress and login.

The next important step is to setup your site. In Wordpress a site is called a Blog.
On the My Blog page create a new blog.

Choosing your blog address here is important. This is the name used for your default website name, http://<yoursitename>.wordpress.com. My suggestion is keep it simple but clear.Then give your site a name, this is the title of your site and create your blog.

Configure your site

Once setup now you can access your blog admin. This is the central configuration area for your site.

First of all I suggest configuring the following:

• Settings > General
• Name your site, add a sub title, add an icon and configure your timezone
• The email address on this page is used for updates and your contact form.
• Appearance > Themes
• Choose a theme for your site. There are plenty of great free themes or you can purchase one.
• Appearance > Customize
• Modify your theme to suit your exact requirements.
• Appearance > Background
• Modify your site background
• Appearance > Header
• Modify the header of your site or add an image

Plan your site

This is the most overlooked step. Thinking about how you want your site to look will help you set it up correctly.

Wordpress has four main constructs:

• Posts & Categories
• Pages
• Links
• Widgets
• Media

Posts & Categories

This is the most essential part of wordpress. When you want to add a new article or item to your site you add a new post. Posts are individual articles. Out of the box these all appear on your main page but you can change this to be another page (more on this later). You can also have these broken into different categories. This allows you to have different links in the menu on your site that take you to individual categories. For example a sports team website may have a News page for all news and categories for scores and events so these can be separate menu items. When you create a post you can assign it to a category. Posts and categories are used for areas of your site that you update frequently.

Pages

Pages are menu items in your site that are not dynamic instead they do not change often and do not show posts. Examples of pages are an about page, a team page or a contact us page.

Links

Links are links to other websites that you want to include or list on your site.

Widgets

On any menu item in your site there can be two parts to the page that displays. The main content and a sidebar that runs down the right hand side. Widgets are components that appear in the sidebar so this can include a map to your organisation, a text/html area, a list of recent posts, a list of popular pages or posts. There are a large number of widget types available to choose from.

Media

Media are the images and documents that you want to display or link to on your site. You can upload them in the Media section or add them as you create posts or pages.

Start creating your site

Once you have considered how you want your site laid out you should now know what pages, categories and widgets need creating.

Create your pages

Start by creating any static pages. You can include only basic content for now. This is done in the Pages section of the admin menu. On your contact page add a contact form. This is done by pushing the button that appear at the top of the page editor. This form will email the site email address when a user submits the form allowing your visitors to contact you.

Create your categories

For your dynamic pages, go to Posts > Categories and create all of the categories you want to use. You do not need to add any posts yet.

If you plan on using Links, go to Links > Link Categories and create all of the link categories you want to use. You do not need to add any links yet.

Create your menu

Now that you have the basic building blocks in place you can configure your menu.
Go to Appearance > Menus.
Here you can choose all of the menu items that you want to appear on your site. You can choose any category, page or external link to be a menu item and rename your menu.
To reorder menu items simply drag them up or down. To add sub menu items simply drag them slightly to the right to indent them.

If you are unsure about the layout in another browser window open your actual site (http://<yoursitename>.wordpress.com) so you can see how it is looking so far. Save and refresh the page to see the latest changes. 

Set your home page and your posts page

Go to Settings > Reading Settings.

Now you can specify which page is the primary page that visitors see when they come to your site. This is the Front Page. You can also specify the Posts Page. This is the page where all of your articles appear.

Start creating widgets

Go to Appearance > Widgets.

Widgets appear in the sidebar on the right hand side of any page. To add a widget select the appropriate type from the Available Widgets on the left and drag it to the Sidebar section on the right. Here you can edit the widget to change the title and settings or enter content depending on the type of widget you have chosen. In the screenshot below I have added the Recent Posts widget. 

By default widgets appear on every page of your site. Selecting the visibility button gives you additional options to control when widgets appear. You can specify widgets to show or hide based on certain criteria. In the example above I have the Recent Posts widget configured to appear on the Home page and on every category page but it will not appear on any other page in my site.

Start creating posts and media

There are two ways to include media you can upload it in the Media section then in a post or page select the Add Media button to insert it or you can use the Add Media button to upload and insert media. Media can include documents such as PDFs, YouTube videos or images.

As you create each post remember to specify which category it belongs to as this will control where it appears on your site.

Publish and Enjoy

Congratulations you have now setup your first Wordpress website. Complete all of your pages and initial posts then advertise your site. These fundamentals should help you understand the basic structure and operation of Wordpress. There are plenty more advanced features you may want to take advantage of but you now have a fully functional Wordpress site.