How to set up a professional site on wordpress.com without getting too techy. How far can wordpress.com take you? What wordpress.com has to offer and what not.

1. wordpress.com – creating a professional site without getting too techy By Deena Levenstein Project Manager http://illuminea.com deena@illuminea.com

2. Me Deena Levenstein, B.Sc. Project manager at illuminea(.com) Love to write (habitza.com, deena.co…) Been playing with wp.com for around 5 years Been working with wp.org for a couple of years Reach me at deena@illuminea.com Or @deenalev (I’ll actually be checking it during @wcjeru)

3. WordPress.com overview Your site is a subdomain of WordPress.com. Over 130 themes to choose from. Lots of widgets/functionality Stats, comments, tags, categories… Blog 3 Gigabytes of storage space and unlimited bandwidth. The ability to embed media from YouTube, Vimeo, flickr, TED, Google Docs, Scribd, SoundCloud, etc. (Full official list: Support-Media.)

4. WordPress.com overview Built-in spam protection Integration with social media Mobile- and iPad- ready Lots of support Lots more (just gotta say that) (Thanks http://wpcommaven.wordpress.com for help with this list!) http://en.wordpress.com/features/

6. .com versus .org SEO Managing all sites under one user

7. Start a site with wp.com Go to wordpress.com “Get started here” Sign up Create a username/password Give your blog a name.

8. Choose a theme How may columns/sidebars? What is on the homepage? Custom header Is it worth it to get a premium theme? Type of content? Language? Approx. how many pages? Blog structure: Shows date/author/tags/categories… Widget areas

9. Themes – right-to-left languages Search for themes tagged “rtl-language-support”. Theoretically, all free themes should be supportive of rtl languages. Activate the theme you want. Go to General Settings. Change your language to the rtl language. “Save Changes.” Take a look at the front end of your site.

10. Setting up your site Go through all settings after setting up a new site. Including: Site title Tagline (doesn’t always show) Reading settings > Choose if the homepage is the blog or a static page. Email settings: Change what text new subscribers to your blog receive. Privacy: Site should be open to search engines.

11. Publicize Settings > Sharing You can have new posts automatically post to your social media profiles (or pages).

12. Share buttons Settings > Sharing You can have share buttons automatically appear at the bottom of content.

13. Widgets Appearance > Widgets Drag and drop. Use Inactive Widget Area to save settings of inactive widgets. Some cool/important widgets: Calendar (of your site’s posts) Categories Custom menu Facebook Like box Flickr Search Text Twitter And…

14. Subscribe widget Blog subscriptions (add the widget to your sidebar) Subscribe to blog after commenting: Settings -> Discussion, enable Subscribe to Blog and/or Subscribe to Comments. See subscription statistics in Site Stats page. Dashboard > Site Stats > Box called “Total, Subscriptions & Shares

15. Media!WordPress photo gallery or slideshow You can see the results at deena.co/images.

16. Embed to your heart’s delight YouTube , Vimeo, Flickr - insert link and unlink it Google Maps – click link button, copy HTML code, past it into the visual editor. And…

17. Embed Google Docs Create document. Make sure it isn’t public.

18. Embed Google Docs 1. Share > Publish as a web page > Start Publishing > select from dropdown “HTML to embed in a page”. 2. Copy-paste the iframe into a post, page or widget in your wp.com site.

19. Embedding media An example of embedding: http://deena.co/2011/09/10/embedding-stuff-in-wordpress-com/ How to embed all kinds of media: http://en.support.wordpress.com/topic/media/ Four ways to insert audio: http://en.support.wordpress.com/audio/

20. Editing content Full screen option Kitchen sink

21. Editing content Always categorize, tag, choose the correct author. Only publish once done. Save. Preview. Insert images. Give image credit.

22. Make your wp.com site more professional http://en.wordpress.com/products/ Domain mapping – Get rid of the .wordpress.compart of your domain. Around $12-$17/year (plus purchase of the domain – we recommend name.com) Premium themes Custom CSS More (check out the link)

23. What you can’t do No advertising http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/ Limited coding http://en.support.wordpress.com/code/

24. Final tips - Content About/Contact pages: Every site should have an About page and a Contact page. Forms: WordPress.com comes with amazing forms. Use one on the Contact page. Content is king. As long as there are no typos. Focus on good, unique content. NO TYPOS! Read out loud, have someone edit. Just don’t publish content with mistakes. Images: Include images (definitely more than I did here). Give credit to image source. Titles: Choose a good title. Preview: Always do a preview before publishing. Always look at the published post once it’s done.

25. Final tips .com: Whenever searching for help, always make sure you’re looking at a wp.com discussion and not wp.org. Screen options: In your dashboard you can choose what you view and how. Drag and drop, hide certain things… If something isn’t working, check your settings. When you’ve outgrown wp.com, move to .org.

26. Basic good practice How to get more traffic (and basic good practice) http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/how-to-get-more-traffic/: Update your About page – make sure you have one. Use Publicize and Sharing Post regularly Link to bloggers like you Respond to all comments (Read the post for the full list.)

27. Resources QuickPress http://wordpress.com/#!/quickpress/

28. Resources VIP: For when your site gets really big. http://vip.wordpress.com/ FoodPress: http://foodpress.com/

29. Freshly Pressed http://wordpress.com/#!/fresh/ Posts wp.com decides to feature How to get on Freshly Pressed - http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/five-ways-to-get-featured-on-freshly-pressed/

30. Support, learning, community http://en.forums.wordpress.com/ (Amazing) http://learn.wordpress.com http://en.support.wordpress.com http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/ - (Closed until Monday this week) The wp.com blog: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/ wp.com on twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/wordpressdotcom

31. Good luck! Deena Levenstein deena@illuminea.com @deenalev