Blog Tips and More…

1- Find your passion.

2- Choose a cool name for your blog or site.

Tip: When choosing a name it is important that you use words people would be searching for.
This will help later with the search engines finding you.

For example: www.mydoglouie.com

Whether you decided to get a Domain name or not, the name will still be important.

If you decided to get a domain name, register your domain name with a company like www.godaddy.com – You can skip this step if you just want to use a name assigned to you. Here is a Godaddy vendor, they are slightly cheaper than Godaddy and you get the same thing.

3- Get an email that you will use mostly for the blog/website.
This is important so you can keep things separated and you can always change this later. I recommend Gmail because all Google products integrate with each other, and they have a great spam handler.

4- Sign up for a blog service and write or post images as often as you can!
Blogging can be an amazing outlet and a place where you can share your life, thoughts and ideas with the world or just get them out of your head!

Blog suggestions- FREE Services:

1- Get an account with Blogger.com

Your blog name will follow this format: username.blogspot.com

This is a blog tutorial on the very easy steps to follow.

2- Or, get an account with WordPress.com

Your blog name will follow this format: username.wordpress.com

This is a tutorial on setting up your blog in WordPress.

These two are the biggest services and they offer some very important features like the ability to export your blogs, ability to ad advertising, and more.

There are several other blog services out there. Most provide the same ease of use. Here are a few others to consider:

Blog.com

Your blog name will follow this format: username.blog.com

Xanga.com

Your blog name will follow this format: username.xanga.com

Tip: You can play around with different services and see which one is best for you. Then you can delete the accounts you are not going to use.

Important Tip: Always spellcheck your blog posts and keep a copy of the entry in your computer!

Website Suggestions – FREE Hosting:

The following sites offer free professional looking web pages. These sites are perfectly fine for you to use for personal sites as well a small business. As a temporary solution they are perfect! Free and easy to use. If you purchased a domain name you can direct it to these sites. For example: If I purchase www.mydoglouie.com I would go to the domain registrar (the place I bought the domain name) and point the record to the new site. This sounds complicated but both services offer help.

1- Sign up with Viviti

Your site name will be nameyouchose.viviti.com

Time to have it up and running is 5 minutes.

2- Sign up with Weebly

Your site name will be username.weebly.com/

Weebly offers a different approach to building your template, but it is also very easy.

Tip: There are many free website services out there, but there are many factors to consider. One of the biggest factors is that in most of these free services, the site is created using their templates and those cannot be moved. So if later, you need to get your own hosting, the site will have to be totally recreated.

Tip: Try one (or both) of the free services and invest a little time to learn how things work, choose your favorite one. Always keep a copy of all your posts and pages, and organize everything you put in the site, so later if needed, you can create the site on another hosting company.

Paid Hosting Sites:

I recommend Godaddy.com, they offer inexpensive hosting and customer service is ok, I have tried several hosting companies and all of them have issues, Godaddy to me, was the best choice. At Godaddy an economy-hosting package cost $4.79 a month for 12 months, and they install WordPress or any other template based platform for you. Choose the Linux plan, because there are many more open source programs that run on Linux.

Tip: I would not use their Website Tonight. This service is quick to start but once it is created the site cannot be moved and customizing a Website Tonight site can be tricky.

There are many good tutorials on Youtube.com that explain in details how to start a blog or website using WordPress templates.

If you need a website for your business, I would hire someone to create a template based site and teach you how to update it. Here is a company I have worked with before, they are inexpensive and reliable.

There are several choices for template based sites: WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are some I recommend. The advantage of a template site, is that after it is created, you can easily learn how to update and maintain the site!