Building Your Blawg In WordPress.Com - A Beginner’s Tutorial

Posted by Dipankar

January 19, 2008

A step-by-step guide with tips and tricks to build a blawg on the WordPress.com platform from scratch and customize it. This is different than installing the WordPress blog software on our own server which provides more options for customization. Installation of WordPress will be covered in another post.

Go to the WordPress.com sign-up page and fill in the requisite details like username, password and email address. Click the “Next” button.

Choose a blog sub-domain which will be your web address like myblawg.wordpress.com, a blog title, the language and privacy preferences. Thereafter, click the “Signup” button to proceed further.

Your account is now active and you can either start writing or change the default template as shown in the next step.

Even though customizing the template is out of the scope of this tutorial, you may want to change the default template to any one of the 65 templates WordPress.com provides. Click the “Presentation” tab and then choose “Themes” to browse available themes. Click on the image of the theme to view the theme in detail and then click the “Activate theme” link.

Write a post and before you do be sure to delete the “Hello World” post. This will allow you to start afresh. In my case, I choose “Blix” template in the above step and wrote my first post as shown below.