When I first started blogging I used a tool called Grey Matter. It is still around (GreySoft) but I don’t see a lot of people using it anymore. It ran on Perl 5 and didn’t really get updated to today’s standard of weblog power. It really was fantastic for its time, and the best in the whole new blogging industry. I mean, it allowed people to leave comments, something very cool. It also created a way to update your website everyday without having to dig into templates.
Today, I use Wordpress because it is simply amazing. I can be set up and running in a matter of minutes, and not have to know much of anything about how a website works or how to set one up. In fact, I set up this blog in less than an hour using stuff I found off the Wordpress website. I didn’t do any design or programming what soever, and yet I have a fully functional website to promote my writing, which is what I am better at anyways.
For site functionality head over to the plug-in section of the site, and you can find something someone wrote to do just what you are looking for. They even make it easy to set up your blog for marketing purposes with Plug-Ins like the Google Sitemap Generator.
Then for design, pick from thousands of themes. They have themes that are bare bone ready for you to build them up, or themes that give you the entire package. I picked this theme from the Wordpress Theme Viewer because it was basic and didn’t take away from the content of the site. I thought it also looked professional and have plenty of space for my Adsense ads. I didn’t have to spend a single dime on design, or waste any of my own time trying to create a design I wouldn’t be very happy with in the end anyways.
I still have a bit of work to do on the pages, but I want to make sure they are perfect. Since they are permanent and placed on every page, I want the information inside these page to be the most important on the site, and really deliver value. I think a lot of sites end up with pointless pages across the top, but perhaps we can come up with something unique.
Its pretty late and time for me to hit the sack, but look how much I accomplished in just a few hours. What did we learn today? Setting up a blog can be easy. Once you do it once it is like riding a bike.
Tomorrow I will go over in more detail how to install Wordpress, and I will dive into some of the plug-ins I set up today. Also, we will take a look at widgets, which give us powerful control with a the ease of drag and drop. See you then!
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4:38 am on October 14th, 2008
Heck yeah…I agree…Wordpress is the bomb.
2:09 am on October 27th, 2008
Ehh….its ok. Blogger allows you to do much more with less fuss in my opinion.