Complete guide to getting your free (wordpress.com) site on the internet.
Good day and welcome to another class, in this class, you will be learning how to host a free website on wordpress.com, hence the (wordpress.com) extension. However, before we get started, I will love to go over a few things, mostly concerning the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org and why you need to know these differences before we move on, let’s get started.
Hosting your site for free and the catch.
It’s no longer news that WordPress allows you to host a website for free on their platform. That’s the entire essence of this class, to show you how that can be done, but there is a catch. The catch is that you never really own the website. Let me explain. The true ownership of a website is in its domain name. A website like Jobreaders.org is ours because, as a company, we own the domain name. But if you open a free website with WordPress, you can’t actually own the domain name. What WordPress gives you is a subdomain.
A subdomain is an additional part of the main domain name, separated by a ‘/’ in this case, the domain being wordpress.com and whatever you name your website as the subdomain. A typical example of this would be a web address that looks like ‘www.yourwebsite/wordpress.com’. There are several implications to this, and we will go over those implications later in the course.
Also, it’s important for you to know the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Knowing these differences will help you avoid many errors in the future you pursue a career in website development with WordPress.
The differences between the two are:
| WordPress.com allows you to run your website for free. However, there’s a catch and if you want to open your site to the full functionalities of WordPress, you’ll have to buy a business plan and pay about $300 annually. | With wordpress.org, you can have a fully functional site with about $30 for the first year and $50 for every year after that. With other hosting companies, you might get cheaper hosting. |
| With wordpress.com, you don’t have to worry about many things like hosting payments, different integration, and website maintenance. | With wordpress.org, after hosting your site on another platform, you have to then integrate the site with WordPress, so as to use its CMS, you have to keep maintaining your site. |
| Even though the basic plan is free, before you can get your website monetized, you have to pay for either their professional, premium or business plans. Of which the cheapest amounts to over $100 annually. | For less than $50 dollars, you can have a fully functional website, with the ability to install plugins, monetize your site and even receive payment on the site. |
| WordPress.com is good if you don’t want to be bothered with hosting, third-party tools, and custom website functionality. You just sign up and get a space of your own almost instantly. The downside is that you won’t be able to customize it unless you go with an expensive plan. | WordPress.org is for website owners who want to be independent. This means that they want to be very involved in the building process, and they want to build everything from the ground up. You’re free to install whatever tools you want and control the overall website functionality. This is the best option if you want to be a full WordPress web developer. |
You might be asking why we bother continuing with wordpress.com, well the answer is simple for educational purposes. That is the only reason why anyone will be allowed to go for free hosting with wordpress.com. To learn how you can host your own website, learn to do some really cool stuff with it, and some of the pitfalls you should avoid, get our full web development course here.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the topic of the day.
Hosting your free WordPress site
The first step is to sign up for wordpress.com. Signing up to wordpress.com is very easy, all you need to do is go to http://wordpress.com/, click on get started. You will be redirected to a sign-up page.
All you need to do now is to fill out the sign-up form. The fields you need to fill in are the E-mail address, Username, Password, and domain name. After filling all these spaces, click on ‘create blog’. Remember that the suffix ‘/wordpress.com’ must be added to your free website web address since it’s a subdomain.
The second step will be to confirm the email and activate the blog. Once you’re done signing up, you’ll get a prompt asking you to confirm your email. Head over to your inbox, an email will be sent to you where you’ll see a button to activate the blog, click on the button to advance to the next stage.
After confirming your email, you’ll be asked to provide a few more details about your blog. These details include the blog title, the tagline, and the language. After doing that, click on ‘next step’ to advance further.
The next step will be to choose and customize the WordPress theme. In this step, you just need to choose a theme for your website. There, you will find both free and premium themes. Choose any of the free themes, select it and move on to the next step. You can always check out free themes and change the theme at any point in time. You can customize the theme using the few tips and tricks that will be shown to you in the video attached to this course. After you’re done with this, click the next step.
Now you can connect with social media, namely, Facebook and Twitter. At this stage, you may choose to configure your Twitter and Facebook accounts here. You can also skip this step, you would be able to configure these items later. But for simplicity, I suggest you do it now.
The last thing will be to finish the process. Once you’re done with setting up your site, click ‘finish’ on doing that, you have successfully created a free website on WordPress.
Time to visit your new website. To do this, you’ll go to your browser, give your complete domain name, (website’s URL). You will now be able to view your website on the internet, thrilling right? And guess what? there’s more that you can do with WordPress, to follow this path to be a full-fledged WordPress web developer, view our full WordPress web development course here.
Other Things To Know.
So before ending this course, let’s go over some of the things you’ll see on the sidebar.
- Dashboard- This is the general area where you can control your wordpress from the back-end, this is where you’ll see the likes of theme updates, plugins and the likes.
- Posts- Here you can edit posts, write, delete, and update existing/new posts.
- Media- For managing and uploading new media files such as images and video.
- Pages- Here you can create new pages, or manage existing ones to serve a particular purpose.
- Settings- There are a whole lot of things you can do in settings, I suggest you practice with your locally hosted wordpress site to unlock the full capacity of the settings tab.
- Appearance- As we stated earlier, this is for trying out new themes and customization.
- Comments- This is where you moderate comments, here you can choose to approve, reply, or delete comments as you see fit.
Follow the video attached to this course for a more in-depth tutorial and deeper explanations of some of the topics raised in this course.
Conclusion.
In this lesson, we were able to go over how to host your blog for free on wordpress.com, the differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. we also looked at the free WordPress hosting plan, its limitations, and step by step guide to hosting your website for free with the ‘/wordpress.com’ suffix.
Following this, you’ll get your free WordPress website up and running in no time. Thanks for completing the course, do well to take the compulsory quizzes at the end of each course for us to see how well you understood the topic and ask questions where necessary. See you in the next class.
Still remember that the full course is available on the platform, you can become a full-fledged WordPress developer with certification from JobReaders, click this LINK to get started.
See you in the next class.