Blogineering

Here is the summary of posts of our WordPress.com Blogging Tutorial Series.

1. WordPress Tutorial 1: Registering a new blog
2. WordPress Tutorial 2: Posting an article in your blog
3. WordPress Tutorial 3: What are categories and tags?
4. WordPress Tutorial 4: Inserting a YouTube video on your blog
5. WordPress Tutorial 5: Managing your theme
6. WordPress Tutorial 6: Working with widgets
7. WordPress Tutorial 7: Publicize and share
8. WordPress Tutorial 8: Final tweaks

Next week, we will be discussing about the tips in improving the visibility of your blog.

If you have followed our past tutorials so far, you would have enough basic knowledge to keep your blog rolling. This particular guide helps you to finalize setting up some of the minor details in your blog.

Here are some final tweaks to do before you embark on your blogging journey:

The General Settings page (Figure 1) enables you to change the name of your blog, your tagline (a catchy sentence or phrase that describes your blog), your email address, and other information.

Set up your Widgets. In this post, we discussed how to work with widgets.  Of course no one is limiting you how many widgets to place in your blog, but you must prioritize the important ones, including Calendar, Recent Posts, Links, Email Subscription box, and Top Posts/Top Rated. Note, however,  that the more widgets you have, the longer your blog to load. Read the rest of this entry →

Now that you already know the basics of blogging, the most important things that you should do are: (1) write a lot of articles; and, (2) share your blog to as many people as you can. Gladly, you just have to do the first because WordPress.com has integrated a lot of free sharing tools.

Wordrpess.com has a built-in sharing system that enables you to connect to different social media.  The Sharing page under the Settings panel would enable you to Publicize and Share easily. Read the rest of this entry →

A widget is a web tool that performs a specific function. They are usually seen as small windows on the side, top, or bottom of your screen. Some of the most common widgets are calendars, clocks, news feeds, and random quotations.

Widgets are seen in websites, in desktop of computers, or even in mobile phones. The two widgets below (the Calendar and Facebook widgets) are examples of widgets at the side bar of Blogineering.com. Note, however, that even though we used Facebook as example of a widget in this blog, WordPress.com does not allow embedding ‘Like Us Facebook’ widgets. It can only be embedded in hosted WordPress blogs.

Most widgets are codes that can be reused in different websites. They are written in  HTML,  Javascript, or other web programming  languages.The code below is the code of the Facebook widget shown above. Read the rest of this entry →

In our previous tutorials, we’ve shown you some of the basic things to consider – from creating and setting up your blogs, to posting your content and adding links and images.

In this short tutorial, we will show you how you can customize the look of your blog/website. Here, we will focus on the theme of your blog. Technically speaking, a theme is a preset package containing graphical appearance details, used to customize the look and feel of (typically) an operating system, widget set or window manager. (Wikipedia)

In short, it is the appearance of your blog; its motif. The multitude of themes – whether paid or free – available for you to download and use, allow you to have different customization for your blog. It kind of enables your blog to have a personality. It can be a free theme which can be found on your Appearance panel (or can be downloaded from www.wordpress.org) or a premium (paid) theme. One difference between the two is that you will get more technical support when it comes to the paid theme. You could also expect most features of the premium theme to be optimized and are really top-notch. However, that doesn’t mean that the free themes aren’t as good. They are, really. But you really have to check the developers of such themes, and see how they respond to technical queries from people using their themes in their blogs. When creating your first blog, it is important to learn from the free themes first, instead of shelling out about $70 or $80 or $90 for a premium theme. Once your blog picked up and becomes successful, then you could opt for a more professional, “premium” look. Read the rest of this entry →