Adding a blog to your website

You need a blog! Whether for business or for pleasure, blogs have come a long way from the original intent as a way to post your daily diary online. Blogs come in all shapes and sizes with the ability to provide an incredible variety of functions. The most well know name in blogs – Wordpress has evolved into a world wide collaboration as more and more people are adding their own creative bits of coding (called plug-ins) to an ever expanding library.
If you thought about a blog but didn’t know where to begin, here are a few tips:

#1 Seriously considering getting your own domain name and web host. I like MomWebs hosting because the tech support is second to none and they use the super easy cpanel. I’ve heard horror stories of people building up a huge blog or several blogs on a free blog site, full of content with thousands of subscribers, only to have the blog get shut down by the blog host. When you use a free blog like blogger.com or Textpad or Wordpress.com, you don’t own any of your site and have no control over what they can do.

#2 Actually a continuation of number one, when you sign up for a free blog, your domain name is something like www.myname.blogspot.com. Fine if you’re posting pictures of the grandkids for everyone to see, but not anything that will be taken seriously if you ever want to use the blog as part of a business venture.

#3 Upload Wordpress to your new website. Go to www.wordpress.org (note the .org part, not .com) Wordpress.com is the business site where they will host a free blog for you. Wordpress.org is the open source (which for you means free software) site where you can download the Wordpress software for your own use.

#4 Once you download wordpress onto your home computer, you’ll now have to use an FTP program to upload it to your webhost. If you use MomWebs, ask very nicely and pay them an extra $10, this is a one time fee, they will install wordpress for you.

#5 Go to www.blogcatalog.com. Scroll down a bit to the tag cloud, which looks like a bunch of random words of varying sizes and click on any term that interests you. Not surprisingly my first choice was computers. This will open a window listing innumerable blogs about your chosen topic. You can browse through the various blogs to get an idea of the incredible variety and styles that you can copy, er make that emulate (it sounds better)

#6 If you are into photography, definitely go check out: http://www.flashmo.com/preview/flashmo_121_3d_grid_gallery and move your cursor around in the the “3D Gallery” box. This photo effect is created using a photo carousel plugin that anyone can add to their blog.

#7 If you find a blog with some features you really love and want to copy. sign up with www.websupportteam.com and for a minimal monthly fee, they will take care of most, if not all of your technical needs to get your site up and running.