A friend of mine just opened a free wordpress.com blog (after reading my comparison to blogger.com) and asked me, “I just opened it. Now what?” I thought I’d share my answer with you, the faceless blogosphere:
When I refer to the Dashboard, you’ll want to make sure you are on http://yourblogname.wordpress.com/wp-admin
1. You don’t need “www” in the web address.
2. Decide what topics you want to talk about. Go ahead and create categories for them (you can always create more on the fly). Do this on your Dashboard under Manage > Categories.
3. When you write new posts, put them in categories (multiple if you like).
4. Choose a new template (or theme) if you like on your Dashboard under Presentation > Themes.
5. Play with your Sidebar layout on your Dashboard under Presentation > Sidebar Widgets.
6. Set your time zone to EST by going to your Dashboard under Options. Time zone should be -5 hours.
7. Add bookmarks (favorite links) that will show up in the sidebar. On Dashboard under Bookmarks > Add Bookmarks.Those will get you going. But mostly, start writing. One of the best things is using categories (topics).
You may want to consider adding pages also. Pages will show up as navigation. They are static. It’s like content you always want someone to get to like an “About Me” page. You could make that a post but it will eventually “fall off” the homepage as you post more things. Making a page allows you to have stuff always one click away.
Make sense?
As an example, I have http://orangejack.wordpress.com/. It’s more similar to what you have than my normal blog(s) at orangejack.com or rob.orangejack.com.
If you want to get together and talk about it, let me know. This should get you started though.
Do you have any advice you’d add?
[tags]wordpress.com, blogger.com, free blog hosting, start a blog[/tags]
