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How to Make a Free Website with Wordpress.com
WordPress.com is a hosted platform that simplifies website and blog creation, offering various customizable themes and built-in web hosting. It differentiates itself from WordPress.org by managing hosting and providing support options, while also catering to different user needs through various plans. The platform allows users to build a website in five straightforward steps, from establishing a site name to customizing design and integrating social media.
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How to Make a Free Website with Wordpress.com
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- 2. Overview • What iswordpress.com • WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org • Choose a Theme for Your Website • Build Your Website in Five Steps 2
- 3. What is Wordpress.com ➢WordPress.com is a platform that allows you to create and manage websites and blogs with ease. ➢ It's a hosted version of the open-source WordPress software, which means you don't need to worry about things like web hosting or domain registration—they handle all that for you. ➢ With WordPress.com, you can choose from a variety of themes to customize the look of your site, use plugins to add extra features, and create content using an intuitive editor. It's a great option whether you're a beginner looking to start a personal blog or a business in need of a professional website. 3
- 4. WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org 4 Comparisonof Features WordPress.com WordPress.org Price Varies by plan for your needs and budget. WordPress.com plans are designed to cater to a variety of needs and budgets, offering options such as Free, Personal, Premium, Business, Commerce, and Enterprise, each adding unique and valuable features to your site. Download the WordPress software for free, but pay annual fees to a third-party hosting provider for your web hosting and domain.
- 5. 5 Comparison of FeaturesWordPress.com WordPress.org Plugins Install plugins on a Business, Commerce or Enterprise plan. Updates are managed automatically. Several default built-in features eliminate the need for many plugins. Proactively blocks potentially risky plugins. Custom plugins are available to install, but depending on the plugin, these could compromise your site. Support WordPress.com support forums, webinars, and videos are available for free on any plan. 24/7 support from expert Happiness Engineers on paid plans. No dedicated support. Visit the WordPress.org support forums for assistance, or check with your specific hosting provider.
- 6. Comparison of Features WordPress.com WordPress.org Experience Needed Easyto use for both complete beginners and experienced professionals. WordPress.com is an all-in-one website builder and host optimized for performance. Customization, site maintenance, and configuration are more hands-on and require intermediate technical knowledge. Hosting Managed hosting is built-in. You don’t need any other hosting provider. You must find and pay for a hosting provider yourself. Speed & Performance Install plugins on a Business, Commerce, or Enterprise plan. Updates are managed automatically. Several default built-in features eliminate the need for many plugins. Proactively blocks potentially risky plugins. Depends on your host and hosting package. 6
- 7. Comparison of Features WordPress.com WordPress.org SecurityHighly secured against hackers, malware, and vulnerabilities. Updates, backups, and free domain SSL are all handled automatically. Depends on your host and hosting package. Features Powerful features help you design, manage, promote, and monetize your website. Varies highly depending on your host and hosting package. Speed & Performance Includes a wide range of beautiful, well-supported themes with vast customization options. With an eligible plan, access advanced customization options, install custom themes, or build your own. Install customThemes themes, or build your own. Site Ownership You own your site content and are always free to move it as you please. You own your site content and are always free to move it as you please. 7
- 8. Introduction to theWordPress.com Dashboard 8
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- 10. Step 1: EstablishYour Site ➢Visit WordPress.com and click on Get Started to create your new account in a few quick steps. You’ll be asked to choose a name for your site to tell visitors what your website is about. Once you choose the perfect name, make it your Site Title in your General Settings. You can add a catchy Tagline here too! ➢Register any available domain for free for the first year with any one- year or multi-year WordPress.com plan: 10
- 11. Choose a Themefor Your Website 11 ➢ Choosing your website’s design is a crucial step. The design of a WordPress website is known as the theme. On WordPress.com, you can switch your theme anytime without rebuilding your entire website. ➢ Typically, the theme you choose includes all the essentials for you to begin working on your website. However, you can later customize your theme, templates, fonts, colors, and more as needed.
- 12. Step 2: DesignYour Homepage 12 Make a great first impression by customizing your site’s front page (known as the homepage). You can load any of these gorgeous themes and then change, add, or remove any elements to make the design your own. Here, you’ll meet “blocks” — these are the building blocks of your website. You can use blocks to add virtually anything to your pages: images, galleries, columns, videos, payment buttons, and much more. Lean on the design expertise of others with block patterns — beautifully designed, ready-to-go collections of blocks you can add in just a few clicks for any kind of layout you can imagine.
- 13. Step 3: CreateMore Pages 13 Aside from the homepage, the most common pages on a website are an About page and a Contact page. Starting from your dashboard, go to Pages → Add New Page to create a new page. You can start with a ready-made page layout (shown in the image below) and make it your own by adding or removing any content as needed. You can also start fresh and add blocks or block patterns to create your own layout.
- 14. Step 4: SetUp Your Menu ➢The menu at the top of a website contains the links readers can click to find their way around your site. You can now add the pages you created in Step 3. Get started by going to Appearance → Editor and editing the Navigation block (or Appearance → Menus for classic themes). 14
- 15. Step 5: AddYour Social Media Presence 15 If you have a social media presence, your website is the perfect place to promote it. You can add these icons to your site’s menu using the Social Icons block.
- 16. Go ahead andlaunch it! If you have completed those five steps, you have a solid foundation for your website. If you are ready to share it with the world, go ahead and launch it! 16
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- 19. Top Companies UsingWordpress Fortune, CNN, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Variety, CBS Local, NBC, New York Observer, New York Post, USA Today 2
- 20. Mercedes-Benz 3 Mercedes Benz usesWordPress to manage its official international website. The German automobile giant needed a way to easily showcase a massive amount of multimedia content (high-resolution images and videos of vehicles), and WordPress provides a built-in media library that allows for categorizing and editing media effortlessly.
- 21. BBCAmerica 4 One of theunique things to highlight with this use of WordPress is that each BBC America show has its own branding and theme. This was accomplished by using Multisite and child themes that BBC America was able to customize to match the show’s content as well as branding. Multisite is a WordPress feature that allows users to create a network of sites on top of a single WordPress installation.
- 22. Glassdoor One of theworld’s top job websites, Glassdoor is a great example of creating a custom platform that interacts seamlessly with WordPress. Users can flow from job searches into blog articles effortlessly with no gaps in the user experience. The company’s blog is a strategic part of their marketing efforts to feed people into the site to perform job searches and to encourage companies to post job listings. 5
- 23. Home Depot (Careers) Witharound 400,000 employees, Home Depot depends on their career site to attract the best of the best when it comes to new talent. This use of WordPress highlights the use of a number of plugins that we personally love – including Yoast (the #1 SEO plugin we use on our clients’ websites), the WordPress Pro Event Calendar (which you can see in action here), and Font Awesome (which is what generates the icons you see on Home Depot’s Career site). 6
- 24. Microsoft News Center Asa part of Microsoft’s transition into open-source software, they researched the best CMS to use and landed on WordPress. In late 2014, Microsoft’s News Center (along with several other critical websites for the brand including Microsoft Europe) relaunched on WordPress. It was a rather complex data migration from a proprietary CMS to WordPress – it involved 38 sites in 16 different languages. 7
- 25. The Walt DisneyCompany ➢ The Walt Disney Company offers information about their company (including their stock price which updates in real- time), a career center, their social responsibility missions, and a newsroom that gets updated regularly with company news (as well as press releases for media). ➢ The site also uses a number of plugins including Yoast (again our favorite SEO plugin) and W3C Total Cache (our favorite WordPress performance optimization plugin – which helps improve your Google PageSpeed score). 8
- 26. Many others 9 Consumer FinancialProtection Bureau U.S. government agencies White House, U.S. Army, The Official Site of Sweden, and so many more
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