It takes more written words than it’s worth, so here we go with videos from people who have more talent than me and have taken the time.
…with Blogger, which has become a great platform for casual blogging nowadays, and is certainly the easiest place to start, much under-rated…
and WordPress — much slower, deeper video, but a much more powerful platform, IMHO…
There’s a little bit more to it than the videos show. But not that much.
In my opinion, buy a domain name from anyone (e.g. Bluehost, the service I use — they have been fine for the last two years and are dirt cheap) and map it to your wordpress.com account, or even better install wordpress on your own hosted server. (If you’re still with Blogger at this point, no problem — your host can map to that, too. WordPress can also import all your blogger posts if you want a fresh start).
Most hosting services, including Bluehost, but also GoDaddy and most of the rest, make that absurdly easy. Look for ‘Fantastico’ in their feature list. That’s a service that will allow you to ‘auto-install’ a load of website software, including WordPress. No technical skill required.
If that last couple of paragraphs sound like a foreign language, then a simple wordpress.com or blogger.com account will be a start. Just go to the address and open the account. It is really easy, as the videos describe. It’s also easy to just have a go and then delete the whole thing: then there’s no embarrassing past to be unearthed by someone. Just have a go and then delete the whole thing.
Once you’ve got some technical skill, or got someone in who has, you can customise to your heart’s content. Priorities: (1) more, better content; (2) that it doesn’t look like shit. Contrary to what the whole advertising and marketing world thinks, content is more important than appearance on the Internet. Get great content and no-one will care about the appearance. Get mediocre content and a great appearance and no-one will care, full stop.
Not looking like shit is an important, secondary priority. First choice (and you went for the hosted service option above, right?), choose from and implement one of the thousands of free themes at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. Second choice, get one of those and customise it bit yourself with Photoshop and a decent CSS editor. Option3: get your designer to create a custom job. If they can’t work with CSS, fire them (seriously).
Even if you’re not planning on blogging anytime soon, go into these services and make sure you have a decent user name, not like the user1238237@hotmail.com you ended up with when you were late to the party with web email. If people are searching for you on the web, they’re searching for ‘yourcompany’, not ‘yourcompany12921134’. You’ve probably already got .com and .co.uk names, but have you got the delicious, flickr, youtube, stumbleupon, etc. names? Gotta get them all. If you can.
Reserve good user names on every online service you can think of, even if you aren’t planning to use them straight away.
Look forward to comments, or get in touch if you want me to sort this sort of thing out for you.
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I really like Tumblr for casual blogging as well — in some ways it’s easier than Blogger, but then you could argue that “tumblogs” aren’t the real thing!
Tumblr is great — and also has the facility to be mapped against your own URL, as well. I wish they’d implement comments and trackbacks, though.