on May 4th, 2008How to Create a Blog in Wordpress (part 1)
Okay, this isn’t necessarily a “how-to,” per se, but I’m just updating my progress on this fairly straight-forward experience.
After reading some illustrious point-counterpoints about Wordpress vs. Blogger (ranging from “Wordpress sucks” to “Blogger sucks”), I decided to keep updating my original Blogger blogs (which have a fairly limited amount of blogger templates but great out-of-the-box SEO), but concentrate primarily on this new Wordpress blog.
First off, having more familiarity with the relatively simple-minded blogspot layout and widgets and the fact that blogger is FREE, I realized that I should spend some time finding a web host that was reliable and CHEAP. After reading several hosting comparisons, I decided to choose Hostmonster as my web hosting provider. I had really flip-flopped between HostMonster and LunarPages –mainly because every sinlge comparison ranked the two as comparably excellent. Oh yeah, I was also considering HostGator (different company from hostmonster, BTW). These three always seem to rank highest on all the comparison charts.
They all have basic, shared server packages ranging from 5 bucks a month to 30 bucks. They also offer dedicated server hosting, in case I end up kicking some major blogging tail and need to move all my posts to a dedicated hosting server–which means my hosting would have its very own server and wouldn’t have to compete with other bloggers’ bandwidths.
It took a bit of time to figure out Hostmonster’s cpanel, but I’d say it was only about one hour of my time–an amount that I can live with.
As far as web site hosting providers go, I am only familiar with the free web hosting company, Netfirms, and, aside from their placing a small adsense banner at the top, Netfirms has always provided relatively decent hosting for me.
Back to learning Wordpress.
After I did some reading and settled on my web hosting, I was ready to dig in to the Wordpress software. Wordpress is actually fairly easy to use once you get used to it–they’ve got some great forums out there, and there are a ton of the best free wordpress themes–some themes are even adsense ready!
In my blog’s case, I downloaded several themes (which I had a bit of a problem utilizing my Frontpage to upload the theme files to the remote ftp of the Wordpress content-themes folder), before finally deciding on the theme you see here. I’m about practicality and ease of readability over what I consider slightly snobby, overly-graphic and cluttered Wordpress templates (although you can find really nice-looking, organized graphic-intensive themes, as well).
My next step was to change the Text of the title and organize my sidebar. This is where Wordpress and Blogger seem comparable. Wordpress offers a similar layout page where you can choose “widgets” that contain information relevant to your readers–the typical blog stuff you expect: archive of posts, comments, “blank” widgets for third-party html and javascript (think affiliate code and adsense), and other cool things like categories and a tag cloud (good for SEO, some might say).
It was relatively painless, despite my previous, whiney first post. I’m slowly learning new things, like adding plugins (which I’ll tackle in a subsequent post).