The WordPress new post interface
If you are starting out from scratch and researching blogging platforms you may start to glaze over at the amount of choice out there but in reality there is only one real choice and that is WordPress. Blogger from Google is very good but if you want to really push the boat out and get it right from the word go, WordPress is the choice I’d recommend. It is tried and tested by probably hundreds of thousands of users and gives great flexibility in the way you can change its looks through themes, widgets and bolt on goodies called plugins. Oh, and it’s free!
I have been badgered by a mate to mention Drupal and Joomla, both open source content management systems and very powerful, but if you want to get going without a steep learning curve – unless you have a brain the size of a small planet – go WordPress.
There are a substantial number of tools called plugins available for WordPress that provide greater functionality. Beware when starting off not to get carried away. Before long it is easy to have dozens of the damn things running in the background and they may slow your blog down.
One of the most flexible themes and one I wish I had started with and not changed to some months down the line is Thesis (affiliate link). It costs around $90 but the flexibility in terms of design etc is worth every cent. Using plugins like Thesis OpenHook even the most inexperienced user can achieve great results. Thesis is also acknowledged as being well designed for SEO (search engine optimisation) for getting your blog searched and ranked by search engines like Google and Bing. Unless you are a devil for punishment it really is a no brainer.
If you are starting everything from scratch -web site, blog etc – and you are not techy minded there are companies such as the one I use, Bluehost -affiliate link – that will set up WordPress at the click of a button. Alternatively a friend of mine – Mike Cliffe Jones with Firas Steitiyeh – has a deal where your blog will be set up free of charge but you have to go with Mike’s choice of host – read more about this great offer at Mike’s Life. If you have any problems or questions with WordPress then you cannot do better than contact another friend Erica Mueller who is becoming a bit of a WordPress guru.
So now you have the web site and blog set up, how do you go about getting your posts up there for people to read?
If you use WordPress there is an integral new post template which I use occasionally but there are other tools out there that will also allow you more flexibility.
If you are a Firefox user there Scribefire which is light and fast but the best tool out there at the moment is a Microsoft product called Writer, part of the company’s Live portfolio. It acts like a glorified word processing package but with added functionality for bloggers such as inserting embedded video clips, tags, etc.
There are other blogging tools out there but very few of them have been updated for years so this makes them pretty useless when it comes to interacting with modern blogging platforms such as WordPress.
One of the great benefits of the likes of the WordPress post interface and Live Writer is that you can schedule posts to be published at specific times and dates. If you are having a good buzz with the creative juices flowing, whip up four or five posts and then schedule them to run on set days.
You may have noticed that throughout this post about blogging tools I have made reference to friends like Mike and Erica and I will next cover the best resource you will ever encounter as a new blogger – the wider blogging community.
