We have learned quite a lot about WordPress.com and free blogging. In this post we are going to discuss about self-hosted blogging.
Free-hosted blogging is a good way to familiarize yourself with the environment of your platform, but if you want to get serious, we strongly suggest that you transfer to a self-hosted blogging.
What’s the difference? Continue reading
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. Continue reading
Now that you know what a blog is and have thought about what to blog, let’s start to register one. Again, we will use WordPress.com in this series.
1. Go to the WordPress.com, and then click the Sign up now button. This will display the Blog Address window shown in the first figure. Type the blog address you want. Note that you cannot use an existing blog address. WordPress will offer you a domain blog for a fee but, for now, we will use the free wordpress.com address.
2. Fill up the Username, Password, Confirm password, and the Email text boxes. Then read the terms of service, choose the language, and click the Sign up button to continue. Continue reading
