Part 7: My Kingdom for a Blog.

Today’s session is short and sweet.

Now that we have looked at buying a domain name, arranging hosting for it and making the two work together by setting the nameservers appropriately, we have everything we need to set up our first website.

The easiest kind of website to start with is a blog. A blog (short for Web Log) is a kind of online journal that you can add posts to like diary entries. Of course, you don’t have to use it as a diary – your posts can be on anything you like, but the software that runs it makes the process of adding new entries as simple as using a word processor. Easier, in fact, because you don’t have to worry about thousands if icons that you’ll never need (like you do with Word!).

The other good thing about a blog is that the search engines love them. the have recognized that blogs tend to be frequently updated and added to – characteristics of web sites that the search engines rate very highly.

So long as the hosting account that you’ve bought uses CPanel (a control panel that certain hosting companies provide), installing a WordPress blog is a matter of clicking on a couple of links and filling out your name on a form. It really couldn’t be easier. Hostgator does provide a CPanel, so if you’ve followed me so far, we are good to go.

In this case, a video is the best way to explain the process of creating your blog. I’ve recorded the whole thing from start to finish and even with my explanations and ums and ahs, it takes just 5 minutes or so. The actual process of setting up the blog takes me about 2 minutes when I don’t have to ex[plain it.

http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video4/

The raw, out-of-the-box blog that you get is pretty basic and dull looking. But don’t worry about that. In the next installment we’ll take a look at how you can change the way your blog looks and behaves – without knowing anything about HTML, PHP or any of that technical stuff. This is true point and click.

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