It’s time for you to set up your new web site! We’re going to use a site called Edublogs, because it is built on the most popular web site building tool in the world, WordPress. With WordPress, you can create anything from a simple blog to a fully professional website.

Sign in here

or go to edublogs.org and click on “Log in” 

Sign in with your computer username with NO DOT and 2023.

ex: jrobson2023

Use your regular password.

Once logged in, make sure you are viewing the correct site. At the top, you’ll see My Sites. Choose the one with your name and go to the Dashboard, where you find all of the tools you need to build & maintain your site.

 

You can see how your site looks by clicking on your site name at the top of the screen (your user name)

If you click it, you’ll notice that your site looks TERRIBLE! Yuck.

Let’s fix that.

Go back to your Dashboard

On the left hand side, you’ll find Appearance. Hover over that and click Themes

Scroll around and find a good one. You’ll mostly be writing about your projects here, so you don’t want something too fancy. We’ll add some pictures here and there, but mostly this one’s about your reflections on your work, so don’t choose something photo-heavy.  Take your time and make a good choice. You can always change it later, but it’s always good to get it right the first time.

Some terrible choices for our purposes:

Here’s the one I’ll use. Feel free to use it if you really want to, but I’d love to see what you think looks nice, so I definitely encourage you to make your own choice. Mine is called Eduboard:

Once you’ve found one that you like, click Live Preview, and you can customize it a bit before your visitors will see it.

IMPORTANT note: each theme will have different customization options, so your theme may not look exactly like mine, but I’ll show you some options that should almost certainly be available for all themes.

SITE IDENTITY

This is basically the title and subtitle for your site. Right now your title will be your user name, but I’d love for you to change that. The purpose of this site is to post your work for ICT class, so your title should reflect that.

Here’s what it looks like:

If you don’t want to use the Tagline, you can leave it blank

There may be other options for your theme like the font, size, and placement, but not for every theme:

WIDGETS

Next, let’s edit the Widget areas

Widgets are basically little boxes that contain different links or site tools.

My theme’s default widget area:

Widgets can be found in several different spots on your site, so you may have to look inside of each area to see what’s already there.

For me, all of my current widgets are in Sidebar Area 1.

Right now, these are the ones that are enabled:

But a couple of them are really useless and annoying, so we’ll remove them.

Start with Recent Comments. Click on the little triangle to see your options.

Delete that!

Then look for Meta. I really hate when people leave this one active!

Delete it too!

After I’ve removed the most annoying ones, I’ve got these left. They work for me.

Feel free to explore the + Add a Widget area and see if there’s something that might be useful for you, and take a look at any others that your theme may have active automatically and decide whether they actually serve a purpose or not.

IMPORTANT: Just like when you’re working on a Word document, you need to SAVE your work. It also needs to be PUBLISHED in order for people to see your changes on your site. At the top, there’s a button that will do both for you!

Here’s what mine looks like now:

 

Here’s a video version of this information that I made years ago at another school. Note that some things have changed since then!