Every deliverable in this course is published, not submitted. Follow the steps straight down. One action each, with the screen you should be looking at underneath it. Nothing here costs money.
≈ 30 minutesFree planNo credit cardCaptured today
Two things to expect before you start
1
It will keep trying to sell you an account.
WordPress.com is a business, and the free blog is the doorway into it. You will be offered a paid plan on the domain screen, again on the plan screen, again in the theme browser, and once more when you press Launch. None of it is a trick, and none of it is required. The free route exists at every one of those screens. It is just never the biggest button.
2
Your first three name ideas are already taken.
There are millions of blogs on WordPress.com and the short, obvious names went years ago. Expect to be rejected several times before something sticks. That is normal, it is not a sign that you chose badly, and the fix is always the same: add a word.
Create the account
1
Go to wordpress.com
Type the address into the bar yourself. Searching for “wordpress” puts hosting adverts above the real thing.
2
Click Get started
Top right, and again in the middle of the page.
3
Click Continue with email
Google is one click faster. Email gives you an account that does not depend on a Google account still existing.
CarefulUse an address you will still have after you graduate.Your university address gets switched off, and it will take your blog with it.
4
Open your inbox and click the confirmation link
One or two minutes. Check spam before you request a second link. Asking three times in thirty seconds invalidates the first two.
Claim the free address
5
Think of three possible names before you type anything
Every simple name is already taken.WordPress.com has run for over twenty years and there are millions of blogs on it. seoulfood, koreanfood, myblog, foodie: all gone, years ago. Do not be discouraged when your first idea bounces. Everybody's does.
What works: two or three real words joined together. Your neighbourhood plus your subject (sindangsauce). Your subject plus a stance (cheapseouleats). Your own name plus your subject (minjieatsseoul). Longer and stranger is better than short and taken.
6
Type your first choice in the search box
All lowercase. No spaces, no numbers, no hyphens. You will be saying this address out loud in your final presentation, so it has to survive being spoken.
7
Click Search domains
The bar across the top now reads Select a domain, Select a plan, Complete payment. Ignore it. You are getting off at the first stop.
CarefulYou are building a BLOG.Wherever WordPress asks what kind of site you want, during setup, in the theme browser, in the guided builder, choose Blog. Not Store. Not Business. Not Portfolio. A shop template is built around products you do not have, and you will spend the semester fighting it instead of writing.
8
Click Start Free on the row that says “Start free with yourname.wordpress.com”
It sits between the banner and the paid cards. One line of grey text, and it is the whole point of this step. If your name is taken, the free row simply will not appear. Go back, try your second idea, and search again.
CarefulThe paid cards are a trap dressed as a gift.They show US$22 struck through to US$0. That US$0 only happens if you also buy a plan for a year. Do not click Add to cart.
9
Click Start with Free on the plan screen
1 GB of storage, unlimited posts and pages, seven days of statistics, and a WordPress.com advert shown to your visitors. No plugins, no custom domain. It never expires and it never asks for a card.
10
Land on My Home
Your blog exists. The panel on the left is where you live from now on. The “Next steps” list is WordPress nudging you toward upgrades.
Name the blog
11
Go to Settings, then General, and fill in the Site Title and Tagline
The tagline is what Google prints under your name in search results. “Just another WordPress.com site” is the default and it is worse than nothing.
12
Scroll down and click Save Changes
Nothing above is saved until you press it. While you are here: Admin Interface Style switches between the WordPress.com dashboard and the classic WP Admin one, which is useful when a tutorial's screenshots do not match yours.
13
Check that it says “Settings saved.”
Pick a free template
14
Go to Appearance, then Themes, and set the dropdown to Free
Do this before you look at anything.Otherwise you will fall in love with a template you cannot have, and the only way to get it is a credit card.
15
Click the Blog tab
Blog. Not Store, not Business, not Portfolio. Those layouts are built around product grids and service pages. You want one built around a headline, a photograph and a date.
16
Click through the ones you like and preview them
You can change your template at any time.Next week, next month, the night before you submit. Your posts, pages, images and menus all stay exactly where they are. Nothing breaks. There are about 78 free blog templates and they look nothing like each other, so click around properly, then pick one and start writing.
17
Start from this shortlist if you are stuck
Ten free blog templates worth your fifteen minutes:
Retrospect Big photographs with the text underneath. The pick if your blog is led by pictures. Ury One large image, one long serif caption. Slow and elegant. Reads like a museum label. Essentialist Huge headlines, dates, almost no decoration. Text first and very readable. Twenty Twenty-Five The current default. Most patterns, most tutorials, hardest to make ugly. Ici An index: small thumbnail, title, category. Good if you will publish a lot. Archivist Pale blue, typewriter, the feel of an archive of letters. Works with no photographs at all. Primarium Ruled notebook paper and a handwritten feel. A personal journal. Indice Dense and encyclopedic, built for footnotes. Research writing, not food photography. Hola Plain blue and white, cheerful, nothing to configure. A safe default. Livro Inspired by books, and the template this course used in 2023. Still free.
18
Check the badge before you commit
Free you can have. Available on Personal and Available on Premium you cannot. Clicking those sends you to a payment screen, not to your blog.
CarefulNow be honest with yourself.If you have looked through the free templates and none of them is the blog you can see in your head, that is the real moment to think about paying. Personal is US$4 a month billed yearly and unlocks the Personal templates. Premium is US$8 and adds the rest plus proper customisation. But write five posts first. Almost everybody who pays in week two regrets it, and almost nobody who waits does.
19
Hover the template you want and click Activate
One click. If you hate it tomorrow, come back and click a different one.
Adjust the design
20
Go to Appearance, then Editor
Identity, Styles, Pages, Navigation, Patterns, Templates. The whole blog is designed here, not page by page.
21
Click Styles, then set Typography and Colors
This is the personalisation you do get for nothing: fonts, colours and spacing, applied everywhere at once. Two decisions and stop. One accent colour, one pair of fonts, body text at 18px or larger.
Comments, and the settings nobody reads
22
Go to Settings, then Discussion
Three checkboxes decide who can talk on your blog. Allow people to submit comments on new posts: leave it on, because a blog with comments off is a leaflet. Comment author must fill out name and email: leave it on, it stops most spam. Users must be registered and logged in: leave it off, or your classmates cannot reply.
23
Set the moderation rules
Email me whenever anyone posts a comment: on, so you know a real person turned up. Comment must be manually approved: off, unless you want to gate every reply. Comment author must have a previously approved comment: leave it on, so the first comment waits for you and everything after it appears instantly. That combination is the one that works for a class blog.
CarefulSave Changes is at the very bottom.Discussion settings are the ones students change, walk away from, and lose.
24
Check Settings, then Reading
Homepage displays: Your latest posts is right for a blog. Set about 10 posts per page, and set “For each post in a feed, include” to Excerpt, so your front page is a list of openings rather than one enormous wall of text.
25
Check Settings, then Privacy
It must say Public.Private and Coming Soon are both invisible to your classmates, to me, and to Google. Coming Soon is the state every new blog starts in.
Write and publish
26
Click New, then Post, and close the welcome tour
It says every paragraph and image is a separate “block” you can drag around, which is true and worth knowing.
27
Type your title, press Enter, and write
Type “/” at the start of an empty line to insert a block by name: /heading, /image, /list. Faster than the toolbar.
28
Click the Post tab in the panel on the right
The other tab, Block, only styles whatever you have selected. Everything about the post as a whole lives under Post.
29
Click Set featured image and choose one
This is the picture used on your front page and whenever anyone shares the link.
30
Open Categories and tick one
Categories are the chapters of your blog, three to five for the whole site. Tags are the index at the back, and five per post is plenty.
31
Click Publish, then Publish again to confirm
Go live
32
Click Launch site in the top bar
Until you do this, nobody can see your blog.This is the step students forget, and then email me asking why the link is broken.
CarefulOne last sales screen.Launching drops you into the domain shop one more time. The free way out is Skip purchase, on the right of the “Current address” row. Never Add to cart.
33
Open your address in a private window
That is the version a stranger sees. If it asks for a password, the blog did not launch.
34
Open it on your phone
More than half your readers arrive on one. Three checks: readable without zooming, the menu opens, the featured image is not badly cropped.
Things worth knowing, that nobody tells you on day one
What the free plan will never do
Not limitations you can work around. Limitations by design, so you know where the ceiling is before you hit it: WordPress.com shows its own adverts to your visitors and you cannot switch them off; no plugins at all (that includes every SEO plugin, every backup plugin, every contact form you have seen recommended online); no custom domain; 1 GB of storage; seven days of statistics; and no way to take payments. Plugins in particular need the Business plan, not Personal or Premium, so half the tutorials you find on YouTube simply will not apply to you.
Google will find you. Naver will not.
Google discovers new blogs on its own, usually within two to four weeks. Naver does not work that way. It only crawls what has been submitted to it, so a Korean audience will never see your blog unless you go and tell Naver it exists. Register at searchadvisor.naver.com with a Naver ID, add your site, and submit your sitemap. Every WordPress.com blog publishes one automatically at yourname.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml. Daum has its own tool as well. This takes ten minutes and almost no student does it, which is exactly why it is worth doing.
Write the headline for a stranger, not for me
“Week 3 Assignment” tells a reader nothing. “Five Tteokbokki Stalls in Sindang dong, Ranked by Sauce” tells them everything. Your headline is competing in a list of ten other links, and specificity is the only advantage you have. A place, a number, or a claim somebody could disagree with.
Publish on a rhythm, not on inspiration
One post a week beats four posts in the last fortnight of the semester, and it beats them by a distance. Search engines reward blogs that keep going, readers subscribe to blogs that keep going, and you will write better when you are not writing four things at once.
Comments are the point
The reason your blog is public is so that somebody who is not in this class can reply to it. Go and comment on your classmates' blogs, properly, with something to say. A blog with a conversation on it is worth more than a blog with better fonts.
You can leave whenever you like
Nothing you write here is trapped. Tools, then Export gives you one file with every post, page, category and comment in it, and any WordPress anywhere will read it back. If you later want your own domain, you move, and you lose nothing but the images, which you re upload.
Before you send me the link
The address ends in .wordpress.com and you can type it from memory.
The tagline is a real sentence about the blog.
You pressed Launch site, and the blog opens in a private window without asking for a password.
Posts are signed with your name, not your login.
There is an About page, and it is in the menu.
“Hello world!” and “Sample Page” are deleted.
Your first post is published, with a category and a featured image.
Every image is yours or credited, and has alt text.
You submitted the live address. Not a screenshot, not a document.
