Introduction to WordPress.com Building an Outreach Page For Your Library Created by John Hanson & Joy Rodowicz

Don’t be scared! This tutorial will teach you the basics of how to create and customize your very own WordPress.com account. Image:

Getting Started! The first step in the process is to open up your preferred web browser and enter the URL/URI This will direct you to the WordPress homepage.

WordPress.com Home Page On the WordPress.com home page there are several options for a user to take. As a new user, you will be clicking on the ‘Get Started’ button in the lower left side of the screen.

Filling Out the Form The next step in the process involves a simple form (which we will walk you through step-by-step). The important thing to remember is, that if you do not already have an address, you should take a moment and register for one before moving on. There are several free services available (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.).

Address: When asked to do so in the WordPress form, you should enter the address that you wish to have associated with your WordPress account. *Note that WordPress checks your address for proper format as you enter it and then suggests possible Username and Blog Address based on your .

Username: You do not have to take the User name that WordPress.com suggests. Often it is simply a matter of availability.

Password: Password choice is important. Strong password use both upper and lower case letters as well as numbers and symbols. You should never tell someone else your password.

Create Your Blog! Here’s the moment of truth! At the bottom of the page you are given two options: Upgrade (For $$$) or Create Blog (For FREE). Because you are new to WordPress and are still learning, you are going to click ‘Create Blog’ and pay nothing. If you decide you want more, you can always upgrade later.

Go Check Your ! Remember when you entered your address? Time to go check it! WordPress.com will send you a message to activate your new account. It’s time-sensitive, so don’t forget!

Inbox In your Inbox, you should find a message that looks something like this. If you can’t find it, check your SPAM folder. It might have been caught by your filters.

Open The Message! Go ahead and open your message from WordPress.com! It should look something like this one here and will welcome you to the WordPress.com family and provide you with a quick and easy way to activate your account. When you click on the ‘Activate Blog’ button, you will be brought directly to the WordPress.com website and directed through the process of setting up your blog. Are you ready? Go ahead! Click the button!

Welcome to WordPress.com! You are now on your way to starting your fresh and exciting new blog. This first page is not important to setting up your blog. Feel free to take a look, but for now, click on the blue ‘Next Step’ button at the bottom right side of the screen.

Follow Your Friends This page is for people who wish to connect their social media account to their blogs. Again, we are not interested in these things at this time, so for now, go ahead and click on the blue ‘Next Step’ button at the bottom of the screen.

Create Your First Post? Are you ready to create your first post yet? No? Didn’t think so. So go ahead and click on the blue ‘Finish’ button at the bottom right side of the screen. We will come back to this when we are ready. Let’s first take some time to customize your page and make it special to you and your library, before we announce your presence to the world.

Wait! Not yet! WordPress.com introduces you briefly to the tools you will use most during your time on the site. The ‘Dashboard’ and the ‘Reader’ being among the most prominent. The ‘Reader’ acts as a homepage and shows you all the blogs you follow as they update. If you want to add blogs to your Reader, click the ‘Follow’ button on any WordPress.com blog. You can always find the Follow button in the grey toolbar at the top of the page. Click your way through all of the dialog boxes until you can declare ‘OK! I’m Ready!’

Getting Started on Your Page! It’s time to personalize your page now. On the top right side of your screen you will find your username. Scroll your mouse over it and a drop-down menu will appear. This time scroll down to where your username is in grey. To the left of your name another menu should come up with ‘Dashboard’ at the top. Go ahead and click it.

The Power of The Dashboard. The Dashboard is where all of the exciting things happen in WordPress.com. Here you have the tools for pages, links, media, posts, and appearance changes. If you have unruly users that you need to block from posting on your site, this is the place to do it. The Dashboard holds the power. Right now, you want to make your pages look nice. So lets go to the menu on the left side of the screen, scroll your mouse over ‘Appearance’ and select the word ‘Themes’.

Choosing A Theme WordPress.com has a large assortment of interesting and versatile themes for you to choose from. Many of them are free, though some are quite costly. Regardless of the theme you choose, you can customize it easily with the tools in your Dashboard. Go ahead and choose a theme. (For the purposes of this example we chose ‘Twenty Ten’ as our theme.

Save & Activate Theme Are you happy with your theme? If not, go back and find one you do like. Once you have a theme that fits with you and your library, go ahead and ‘Save & Activate’ the theme. You will find the blue button at the top left side of your screen.

The Header Now let’s do something interesting with the ‘header’ image of our site. (Again, the theme we chose has a header, yours may not. If this is the case, please skip ahead to slide #27.) In the left menu on the Dashboard page, select ‘Header’ under the ‘Appearance’ label.

Several Options for ‘Headers’ On the ‘Header’ page you are given several options to choose from. You can upload a file from your own computer if you have a specific branding that your library prefers to comply with…

Header options (cont’d) … You can choose from the lovely high-quality images that WordPress.com provides for their templates. Also, there are options to remove the header image and to ‘Show header text with your image.’ Some options offered may come with pricey upgrades, so be aware of what you are selecting. Once you are happy with your header, go ahead and save your changes by clicking the blue ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom left side of your screen.

Header Saved Go ahead and take a look at your page and see how it looks! Click the ‘Visit your site’ option at the top left side of your screen, this will show you how others currently see your page.

Looks good, but… It may be pretty, but it has nothing to say! Looks like it’s time we fix that. First, we had better fix that ‘About’ tab there under the header next to the word ‘Home.’ Go ahead and click that and we’ll get going.

‘Edit’ Your Page Somewhere on your ‘About’ page you will find the word ‘Edit’ in blue. Click that and it will bring you to the editing page that you see here. Now you will be able to describe your pages and your library in however much detail you like. When you are finished, click the grey ‘Publish’ button at the top right side of the screen.

Adding a New Page That looks great! Now let’s go do it again. This time, we’ll make our own customized page that is special to our site.

Adding a New Page To add a new page to you site, just go to your Dashboard menu – select Pages – then select Add New. That’s it. You can name your pages anything you want and include images and links if you like as well. The Muddy River Library is focused of film and October is Steven Spielberg month. So we are going to teach you a couple more fun little tricks before finish the tutorial.

Posting a Picture If you want to post a picture in your post, click the ‘add media’ icon above the post block on the left side (it looks a little like a tiny web camera). This brings up a window that prompts you to either drag a file from your computer or browse your files on your own. Once you have the file, fill out the text boxes and ‘Insert into Post’.

Picture it Now! Now that you have the appearance of your page all set, perhaps you also want to provide visitors with links to other resources. This too can be accomplished while you are in the ‘Edit Page’ or ‘Edit Post’ options.

Linking to Outside Sources The first step in linking to an outside source is to highlight the text in your post that you want your users to be able to click on to get to the new source. After that, click on the icon at the top of the text editor that looks like a couple chain links. This will bring up the pop-up box you see here. Insert your intended URL destination, give it a name/title. And click the blue “Add Link” button.

Posting Video is Fun! It’s quite easy to make your site fun and interactive. Adding something as simple as embedded video from YouTube can make your user’s experience a pleasant one. First, find a video that you want to use on your page. Once you have the URL code, all you need to do is post it directly into the text form for your post like you see here.

A Site Worth Seeing! Now you have a WordPress.com site that you can be proud of. While there are still lots of new and exciting tools that you can learn here, these are just a few to get you started. Also, you can check out the site we created during this tutorial here:

If You Want To Explore More: wordpress-tutorials-february-2012/