Blogs are getting more and more popular every day, but the technical particulars on how to set one up can be a bit confusing. This guide aims to straighten out everything there is to know on how to set up a blog. If you find any of this confusing, then throw your computer out a window.
Just kidding! If this guide fails to straighten anything out, or you’d like someone to do the work for you, you can leave a comment on this post or get in touch with me at jim@hodgsonco.com or by phone at (404) 492-9692. I’m your guy.
But now, to business! First of all, you should think about how much control you’d like to have over the look and feel of your blog. If you are just starting out and you’ve never written a single word before, then I recommend that you start with a free blogging service to get your feet wet. The good news is, there are lots of free options.
If you are brand new to Blogging…
Did you keep a diary as a kid? Do you miss being able to write down all those weird feelings you have? Don’t lie, we all know you have wierd feelings!
If this blog is for writing those sorts of personal journal style entries only, then I suggest trying out these options:
On either of these sites, you’ll be given an address like http://newblog.diaryland.com where people can see what you are writing. They don’t really have an option (as far as I know) for using your own domain name.
As I said, these two sites are more for personal journal entries. They tend to emphasize the community of other journal writers around you. They offer the ability to do things like add friends and follow other people’s journals, as well as comment on entries and that sort of thing. They are both great choices to get started, but they might not be what you’re looking for if you are going for a more serious blog.
I want to get a little more advanced!
If you are starting something a little more serious like a blog for your work or a music review site, or you just want to be your own blog and not really part of a journal writing community, then there are some free services that cater to you as well.
These two have the ability to look a little more serious, and provide some options for changing the look and feel of your blog using themes. Their free options, however, still don’t allow you to have your own domain name, so you will be http://newblog.wordpress.com or blogger.com.
Let’s have a quick disambiguation about WordPress.
WordPress can refer to the site at wordpress.com where one can get a free blog, but more often when I am speaking of it I am referring to the free blog software that anyone can download and use on their own servers. It’s also called WordPress.
It should be said that one of my favorite blogs, BikeSnobNYC has a wildly successful blog for free at Blogspot, appears regularly on NPR to talk about bikes, and has even been asked to write a regular column for Bicycling magazine. So, you can take a free blog without a custom domain name about as far as any blog can go.
I want to be able to control everything…
If you want some more control over your blog, and you want to be able to add things like themes and widgets, then you might consider some pay options.
Let me talk shortly about themes and widgets in case these terms are foreign to you. My experience is mostly with WordPress, so my definitions hover around that.
A theme is a collection of PHP code and HTML code and CSS styles (in the case of Wordpress themes) that tell the pages how to look. The page you are looking at now uses a custom WordPress theme designed by myself and my friend Kurt Rampton. If you want to have a lot of control over how your blog looks, you need theme capability.
A widget is a little snippet of code that does one thing in particular. For instance, you might see somewhere on this page the words “Recent posts”. The code that generates that list and updates it automatically when a new post gets made is a widget. There are widgets for everything. Search widgets, photo displaying widgets… anything you can think of.
If you look at this page on the site for Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area, a site I’m proud to have worked on, you’ll see a box with an orange tab at the top on the left hand side of the page that contains a photo that changes every time the page loads. That is a simple example of a widget.
So, if you’ve decided you want your own domain name, or you want a little more control over how your site looks and what it can do, or both, then you probably want to host your own blog. So, what does that entail?
Without getting into too much detail, there are three main pieces. You need to register a domain, you need a server to host that domain, and you need blog software on the server.
Here are some more quick definitions to help out a bit:
A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS).
In this page’s case, hodgsonco.com is the domain name. If you already have a company domain name you might want to use what’s called a subdomain, such as blog.yourcompany.com.
The upshot is that your domain name is like your street address, but for the internet.
A server is an application running on a computer that delivers a service.
The word “Server” is also used to refer to the computer on which server software runs, which is the kind of thing that technical people come up with to confuse non-technical people. Haha, gotcha!
In my previous metaphor, if your domain name is like your street address, then the server is kind of like your house.
Blog software, like Wordpress, works with the server software to deliver content, and with you to help write content.
Basically, blog software is like a liason. The server talks in markup language (HTML) that your browser understands, telling your browser how to display the words and pictures that make up a web page. You could write this code by hand, and in fact that’s how it’s been done everywhere until recently when blog software started getting so good, but it’s kind of nerdy. Not everyone knows how to do it.
Wordpress makes writing posts and pages as easy as editing a Microsoft Word document, so you don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to keep your site updated, which is critical for your ranking in search engines.
To stretch my metaphor even further, Wordpress is like the furnishings that you put inside your house. Sure you could live in your house without it, but it wouldn’t be as nice!
So, how to get these three pieces together?
The best thing you can do is get in touch with my friend Chris Kelly over at ithought.org. He runs a one-man hosting operation, so if you send him an email you are emailing him personally and he gets back to you fast. He lives and works right here in Atlanta, has competitive prices, and is a smart guy.
I have a thing for using small local companies whenever I can, probably because I AM a small local company, but if you like larger companies there are also some options for getting what you need all in one place. Here are two companies:
These guys both offer you the ability to sign up for a new domain name, which costs about $20 or so a year, sign up for your server for around $10 a month give or take, and install Wordpress with a few clicks. They’ll handle renewing your domain and even upgrading the Wordpress software for you. The Wordpress software itself is free of charge.
Once that’s done, you will have a lot of options in Wordpress for things like naming your blog, choosing a theme, and then customizing your theme, but I’ll cover that stuff another time.
So, that’s my page on how to start a blog! Thanks for reading. Of course if you need custom themes or help with anything to do with the internet or social media, I can help, so leave a comment here, email me, or call me up at 404.388.6951.
