So, you’ve decided to create your own blog site, and even purchased your domain and hosting already! You’ve even installed wordpress onto your domain. You are now all ready and eager to log in and set up your wordpress site.
Congratulations!
In case you haven’t done the previous step of securing your domain and installing wordpress to the domain, follow the steps to do so here.
Go on, we’ll wait for you.
Back? Great! Let’s carry on.
Selecting a WordPress Theme
First things first, you’ll need to log in to your wordpress admin page. You can do this by adding /wp-admin to your domain, provided the wordpress instance was installed on the core domain proper.
So, go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin, and input your credentials to log into the admin console.
Once you’re in, you’ll first appear on the dashboard page of the admin console. The dashboard shows you, in a quick glance the number of posts you have, comments on the posts, and recent activity. Since we’re talking about a fresh install, you will not have any stats to show.
What you really want to do first, is to select a theme. Think of a theme as the skin of your site, and it really determines the look and feel of it. On the left column menu bar, go to Appearance > Themes.
To browse themes, go to Add New, and you can filter by popularity, or if you have a certain feature in mind, you can go to advanced filters. To help you along with selecting a theme, you can easily preview them to see how it looks in the wild, before you install and activate.
After seeing one you like, simply hover over it, click on install, and wait for the magic to happen!
Writing your first Post
Woohoo! Now it’s time to hunker down and think about your very first words on this spanking new site! On the left column menu, go to Posts > Add New, and start writing away.
WordPress makes it really easy to write without knowing code. You can easily add pictures, gifs, format your content with headers and add video content by embedding it from YouTube etc.
It’s time to put all that creativity to work and crank out your very first post.
I’ll be happy for you to link it to me in the comments and we can all celebrate that moment together!
Granted, there’s still a lot of work to do; customising your theme and really making it personalised, adding categories and menus to your site, adding content to your sidebar if you want one, and generally mapping out how the site will look and be structured.
But hey, these can wait. Yay to cementing your very own spot on the internet!