Putting Out the Welcome Matt
Seems the long weekends bring out a rash of new users trying their hand at starting a blog on WordPress.COM. I thought I’d repeat here what I’ve posted previously in the forums and in the odd mail that shows up from people using my contact form.
If you are entirely new to blogging, learn a bit first about blogging before you learn about the means to get there.
If you already understand what blogging is, then next understand why you want to blog.
If you’ve understood why you want to blog, next understand what you are going to blog about. WordPress.COM has conveniently provided a general list of the types of blogs allowed here. Also, advertising of some sorts is not allowed on WordPress.COM. If this last point is a deal breaker for you, then WordPress.COM is not the place to set up your blog.
After you sign up for a WordPress.COM blog, your first stop for getting your feet wet in WordPress.COM are the Support Docs, as they give a broad layout as to the various features available. I also heartily recommend picking up the 2nd or most recent edition of “WordPress for Dummies” by Lisa Sabin-Wilson at your library. While mostly for self-hosted WordPress (or WordPress.ORG), there are three chapters dealing with WordPress.COM and the book is laid out in a way that learning is more fluid than just browsing or searching the Support Docs, although all the info in the book is right there. (NAYY-just a fangirl.) Do be aware that WordPress.COM regularly tweaks and integrates new features even before they are released as a part of a regular WordPress update, so some material in the book may be slightly outdated by the time you read it.
If your topic isn’t covered in the Support Docs, your next stop should be the WordPress.COM User-to-User Support forums. Before asking your question there, please read and follow the two stickies at the top of the forums, which have lots of good information for new users of WordPress.COM. Next search the forum tag cloud and use the search form to see if your topic hasn’t already been asked and answered. The forums have been around for nearly three years and most every possible topic has been covered numerous times. A SEARCH TIP: the search box in the Support Docs is really good at turning up the more recent and relevant forum posts too.
If you’ve done all the above and still come up empty-handed, then by all means ask in the forums or contact Support directly through the link in your WordPress.COM Dashboard.
The Support forums are also a fount of creativity. There are a lot of skilled users who have come up with some great ideas and workarounds and also blog about them. Here’s the short list:
http://csswiz.wordpress.com/
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/
http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/
http://teckline.wordpress.com/ (now http://wpxpert.wordpress.com/)
http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/
There’s a learning curve involved in getting a blog up and running on WordPress.COM. Don’t expect to know everything right off the bat or set up your blog 100% the way you want it to look right at the start. If you want to experiment first, make your blog private or set up a second blog for testing if you don’t want those experiments to be out in the wild.
That’s making the long story short, but that’s all the time I have for now. Questions? I’ll check back in the morning after brewing a pot of coffee.
Updated: Now with excellent video where Matt discusses the future of WordPress:
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Posted on 7 September 2009, in Blogging, Saw it on the WWW and tagged Don't Panic, how-to, WordPress.com. Bookmark the permalink. 12 Comments.
A well written and comprehensive post that’s bound to be of use to newcomers. Thanks for linking to onecoolsite in it.
Thank you TT. Your site and its predecessors were the first resources I turned to as a newbie blogger on WordPress.com, so I take your comment as high praise.
The one thing I keep asking staff for is contextual links to Support Docs from the various dashboard screens. IMNSHO It would make the WordPress.COM experience so much better.
I’m gonna be pasting in a link to this A LOT.
Thanks rain! One RT by you is worth a thousand links.
Very well said and informative for new comers to WP thank you for taking the time to write this informative post and also thank you for linking to my site. I will bookmark this article and will link to it often.
Thank you, t3ck and you are most welcome!
Great informative piece! You can do a ‘welcome matt post’ on the most prominent contributors to the WP forums which will include Richard, Raincoster apart from the people in this list and of course you!
I had planned a post on this but I have spent not enough time on the forums frankly unlike all of you. In fact WP should officially reward people who help so much.
There is a Learning curve indeed! Most users ignore it, alas! In the forums, I ran into a guy today who gives 100 tags and often his taglist is longer than his post! He is correcting himself now.
Hi Vikas, thanks for stopping by from the forums. Being a user-to-user forum, it’s unlikely that there will ever be any official recognition for volunteer contributions. But that’s not why we’re there. As I’ve pointed out before, I’m from Minnesota and can’t help it.
My biggest wish is that people who have been helped in the forums and have learned from their WP.com experiences, that they too come by and help others in the forums. It’s the “Karma effect”.
well here’s a dumb question from a newbie…
so I’ve got a blog set up with 4 pages….
got that far …. looks pretty good…
But…
now how does anyone know it exists?
How do I know what other blogs exist at WordPress in case I’d like to read some?
Shouldn’t there be a directory list of blogs so people can see what topics they are interested in?
I’m confused :-}
First off, read the 2 stickies in the Support forum I mention. They are chock full of useful information for newbies, including how to link your WordPress.com username to your WordPress.com blog. That way, every time you leave a comment on someone’s blog, like here, your username will link back to your blog. Makes introductions easy-peasy.
As far as finding other WordPress.com blogs, since the redesign of the WordPress.com homepage, it’s not been obvious, but there are the Tag pages, which you can find here http://en.wordpress.com/tags/ There’s a discussion topic in the Support forum about the redesign, and any input you’d like to give should be done there. Tag pages can also be found by clicking on the tags and categories you use in your own blog’s posts.
What great information! Thank you.
I managed to get up and running just fine, I just didn’t know much else yet. I’m definitely bookmarking your site.
Thanks for commenting! I suggest bookmarking the sites I mentioned in my post.