OK, so you entered the required info into the WordPress site for a free blog, and got an email from them with an activation link. Click on that link. WordPress reminds you (for the last time–take note) of the username and password for your blog. Click on the link to log-in to your blog, and enter those in the appropriate boxes and press enter. If you have a good browser (like FireFox) , it will ask if you want it to remember that log-in data for you — if you are on your own computer, select yes.

The next page is your WordPress control panel, and it is fairly similar to the one you will use when you install your own version of WordPress on your own server space. The default installation has a few samples — a sample post, sample page, sample comment. A post is one of the periodic messages, such as you are reading now. A page is other content — such as the ‘about’ in the upper right corner of my banner, above. A comment is input from outside users.

Before we enter the post you wrote last night (remember your homework?) we want to change a few of the basic settings. The top of your control panel has the title of your blog in large letters, and next to that a ‘visit site’ button that will take you to your blog. Click on that and look at your new blog, then hit the back button to return to the control panel.

Beneath the title is a row listing different functional areas of the system, and depending on which one is active, there may be a another row below that with sub-pages listed. The upper row has the most common functions on the left, and in smaller text to the right the settings and user functions. Begin by clicking on the settings link to the right there.

Notice that the second line — showing the sub-pages, has nine options for the settings section, beginning with ‘General’ which is the page you are viewing. The first thing we want to change is the second item on this page, the tagline — because yours is not ‘Just another WordPress.com weblog’. Think of this as the sub-title of your blog, and write something appropriate. You can always change it later.

Hint: if you are using the FireFox browser, and you should be, it does not automatically spell-check single line text boxes like this, only the multi-line boxes. So click on the right mouse button, and select ‘Spell check this field’ if you are not 100% sure of the spelling for the words you entered.

A little further down the same page is a check-box that says users must be registered and logged in to comment. I’d leave that blank for now, but remember it is there if you begin to get any objectionable comments, you can always check that later. Notice the bottom of the page has a ’save changes’ button, be sure to press that to save your new sub-title.

Look at all the other pages under settings, to see what you can change. If you understand the options, change them if you wish. If you don’t understand what is going to be different if you change a setting, look it up in the ‘Help’ section, using the link near the top of the page. For now, you can just leave all the settings at their defaults, if you want.

Your next choice is what you want your blog to look like. Click on the ‘Design’ option. You will see samples of available ’skins’ or layouts you can use. Choose one that appeals to you. Click on that ‘View site’ button again, and you will see how it changes when you select the other skin. This too can be changed whenever you want, so don’t agonize over making a choice, just pick one.

Click on the ‘Comments’ option in your control panel, check the empty box next to the one existing comment, then click on the delete button to remove it. Click on the ‘Manage’ option and do the same with the one post. Notice the ‘Manage’ option has lots of sub-pages, explore those to learn more about what you can do. Notice that there is an ‘About’ page under the ‘Pages’ sub-list under ‘Manage.’ Rather than delete that I suggest you edit it.

So go to ‘Manage’ and ‘Pages’ and find the ‘About’ page listed.Click on the name of the page — ‘About’ in this case — and you will be taken to the edit page. Leave the name as is, but delete the paragraph in the big text box by selecting it all then pressing your delete button on your keyboard. Type in your own description of what your blog will be about.

When that is done, click on the ‘Save’ button to put your edited page on your site. Then click on the main category labeled ‘Write’. By default you are taken to the place to write a Post — but notice the sub-pages line has an option for writing pages instead, if that were what you wanted to do. Right now though, you have your first post all written, and want to put it on the site. So just copy the title from WordPad or whatever program you wrote the thing in, then click inside the title box and paste your title in there. Copy the rest of the article and paste it into the big text box. If you are using FireFox, go through the text looking for red-underlined words and correct those that are misspellings.

Go down lower on the page and find the categories section, only ‘uncategorized’ is available, so click on the ‘Add Category’ link and type in the name of the category your post relates to. If your site is about Fishing, and you wrote a post on selecting a fishing rod, you can create a category ‘Equipment’ or even ‘Rods’ if you plan to write a lot of posts on just that subject. Click the ‘Add’ button and you see your new category added to the list, and it is automatically selected. Now just go back up the page, and next to the big text box is the ‘Publish’ button — click that and your first post is on-line! There is also a ‘Save’ button, that would save your post so you can edit it later, but it would not be visible on your site yet. You need to use the ‘Publish’ button to make a post visible to the world.

In the next post on this topic I will give you some tips for making your new blog a success. For now, just explore all the options the software gives you, so you know what is available. You won’t be using all those features, but the more you know the better your choices will be when it comes time to select features for your first blog, or any subsequent blogs you make, using the free WordPress software.