The “Add New Themes” link is not available in the Dashboard navigation on WordPress.com-hosted sites because you are not allowed to upload your own themes on WordPress.com. You can pay extra to be able to use custom CSS on WordPress.com, but this is not the same as being able to upload your own theme. There are other limitations with WordPress.com-hosted sites, like the fact that you cannot install Google Analytics and you cannot add plugins.
In general, if you want to start off with WordPress.com-hosted site, I recommend that you pay to register and use your own domain name. That way, if you decide to change your site to a self-hosted WordPress installation, all your links will be preserved.
Here’s what the menus look like in the self-hosted WordPress Dashboard versus WordPress.com:
Self-Hosted WordPress Dashboard Navigation
On a self-hosted WordPress site, there is an "Add New Themes" link under Appearance
WordPress.com Dashboard Navigation
On a WordPress.com-hosted WordPress site, there is no "Add New Themes" link under Appearance
UPDATE – PLEASE NOTE:
The latest version of WordPress, WordPress 3.0, includes custom navigation menus. They are built into the new default theme, Twenty Eleven. Many themes on WordPress.com support custom menus. If your site is hosted on WordPress.com or you are using a theme that supports the new custom navigation menus, hiding a double Home page link is easy. See the tutorial on WordPress 101 called Building Custom Menus.*
IF YOU HAVE A SELF-HOSTED WORDPRESS SITE WITH AN OLDER THEME:
If you have a “self-hosted” site instead of one hosted on WordPress.com, you may be able to use the Exclude Pages Plugin for WordPress to hide your extra Home page link and any links that appear in your sidebar Pages navigation.
You can’t install plugins on sites hosted by WordPress.com. That’s one of the main drawbacks to hosting with WordPress.com. For those sites, this YouTube video tutorial (below) is still useful.
This beginner-level WordPress Tutorial shows how to make a “static” WordPress page your Home page (also called a “front page”), and how to hide the second Home page link that sometimes appears in your site navigation when you make that static page into a Home page.
By default, a WordPress website displays the blog page on the home / front page. For example, on the Business Blogging 101 website home page at https://mcbuzz.wordpress.com you see blog posts with the most recent post at the top of the page and earlier posts below that.
WordPress allows you to select a different page as your home page, so that you can display more traditional content like information about yourself or your business. You can also create another page to use as your blog page, with a link to that page in your site navigation. Watch the video tutorial below to see how to do this.
One problem you may run into when you make a static page your home page is that the link to that page now appears in the main site navigation, so that you have two links to the same home page – usually the page called “Home” in the main site navigation. The second part of this tutorial shows how to remove one of those links from your site navigation so that visitors to your site are not confused by the duplicate link.
WordPress Tutorial – How to Make a Static Page Your Home Page & Hide Double Home Page Link
*Note the “Pay What You Wish” pricing on WordPress 101. Business Blogging 101 is not an affiliate of WordPress 101 WordPress tutorials, meaning that I don’t get a kickback for referring people there.
UPDATE – PLEASE NOTE:
If you have a “self-hosted” or third-party-hosted site instead of one hosted on WordPress.com, you may be able to use the Exclude Pages Plugin for WordPress to hide Child Page links that show in popup submenus under your main navigation links and any links that appear in your sidebar Pages navigation.
You can’t install WordPress plugins on sites hosted by WordPress.com. That’s one of the main drawbacks to hosting with WordPress.com. For those sites, this tutorial is still useful.
This beginner-level WordPress tutorial shows 1. How to make a “child” page or subpage of another page (a “parent” page) using the WordPress 2.7 editing interface. And 2. How to hide a link in the Pages sidebar widget, in other words, how to keep a link to a page from showing in the Pages sidebar widget by putting the page (post) ID number into the “Exclude” box in the Pages sidebar widget dialog box.
Making “child” pages (subpages) is useful because you may not want all your pages to show in the main page navigation of your WordPress theme. In most themes, only “main” pages (pages that don’t have a “parent”) show up in the main page navigation. In some newer WordPress themes, child pages show up in a popup menu that appears when you roll over the main page link. And in some themes, sub-subpages show up in popup menus as well. These are sometimes called “cascading” navigation menus: sub-subpages show up in a popup menu when you roll over a subpage link.
The second part of this tutorial shows how to hide (or “exclude”) a link to a page that would otherwise appear in the links of the Pages sidebar widget. The tricky part of excluding a link is finding the page / post ID number. I show you how to do this.
Excluding a link is useful for a number of reasons. One is that when you make a static page your Home page in WordPress (by telling WordPress to diplay a Page as your Home page instead of displaying your blog posts), some themes will show the link to this static page as a second home page link in your main navigation. By making the Home page a subpage and excluding that link from the Pages sidebar navigation, you can eliminate the double Home page link.
In WordPress 2.7, you select a static page to use as your Home page using the Settings > Reading panel in the Dashboard. When you do this, be sure to create a new page to use as your Blog page. If you do not designate a page to use as your Blog page, your blog posts will no longer be visible.
How to Make a “Child” Page (Subpage) & Hide a Pages Sidebar Widget Link
Part 2 shows a way to hide the link to a page that you use as your home page so that people aren’t confused by the fact that there are two links to the same page in your navigation. That method works when you have navigation in the sidebar that shows subpages AND subpages are part of your site. If your site doesn’t have subpages, there is no way to hide the link to your home page. It will show as a subpage link. That sentence is no longer true! As an intrepid reader points out, the WordPress Pages navigation widget now allows you to exclude any page from its links.
The video tutorial below shows you how to a make a custom sidebar using WordPress Widgets so that you can remove page navigation from the sidebar and make the home page a subpage whose link does not appear in the navigation.
But the best way to go (I haven’t made a video tutorial for this yet) is to exclude the Home page from your Pages navigation in the sidebar using the Pages widget. As noted by a reader commenting on Part 2 of this Static Page / Home Page WordPress tutorial, you can keep Pages navigation in your sidebar without having to show a link to your Home page there.
The Pages navigation widget allows you to exclude any page using the page ID number.
You can insert the Page ID of any page you want to exclude into the “Exclude:” box when you Edit the Pages widget. Find the ID number of your Home page, put that in the “Exclude:” box of the Pages widget, and the link to the Home page will not show in the sidebar.
This Beginner-level WordPress tutorial shows how to create a “child” page. A child page is a subpage that has another page as its “parent”. In some WordPress themes, links to child pages appear underneath a link to the parent page in the website navigation links — either in the sidebar or under the main horizontal navigation links. In other WordPress themes, you cannot see any links to child pages.
In either case, you can create a visible link to a child page by making a new link under one of your Blogroll categories. This tutorial also shows how to find the web address (URL) of a WordPress child page when it is not visible anywhere in the website navigation links.
If you find these tutorials useful, please consider making a donation to Business Blogging 101 through the McBuzz Communications website. Donations made to Business Blogging 101 help to grow the collection of free WordPress and Web Marketing tutorials available here.
Free WordPress Tutorials - Business Blogging 101 
You must be logged in to post a comment.