Things You’ll Need to Consider Setting up Your Own Blog by the Rich Sage: Part One

Everyone wants to start a blog. These are the considerations I needed to make when I decided to jump on the blog train.

The very first of such considerations was how I was going to host my blog.

Here are the options:

• Using a blog hosting service such as Blogger or Wordpress.com and a host of others.
• Creating my own site using a website template.
• Installing a Content Management System (CMS) such as Joomla or Drupal.
• Installing a CMS that was quick and easy to manage, such as WordPress.

Here are the reasons why I eliminated the first 3 of the above options…

Hosted blog service was eliminated because of the limitations such as having my own domain name, plugins and search engine optimization. For anyone who’s serious about success and long-term growth, a hosted option will not work. It’s a bit like driving a rental car –you’ll just have to pick from what’s available.

The next option was to create my own site with a web site template. That’s easy and may take 5 min. However, the problem comes up when a change needs to be made for example in the “daily post” view. If there are 500 pages, then 500 changes need to be made and the pages uploaded again.

That’s not the worst problem. These days CMS programs, mostly through many wonderful plugins do a lot more than management of ‘pages’ –A CMS with the right plugins will manage everything from sitemaps to comments to spam and a whole lot more. This simply cannot be done with a web site template and a site design program.

Then my choice was to go with a sophisticated CMS like Joomla or Drupal. I think those are fine choices for building a community. It’s like a “Community in a Box” which you can deploy to setup an overnight interactive web portal. I felt that was simply “overkill” for what I wanted to accomplish.

I just wanted a place to get started. Nothing fit the need better than WordPress! Of course, that was just the start. Now I am working on the third-generation theme, which will “GO Live” by the end of the month giving me these benefits:

• The power and flexibility of WordPress 2.5.1 -A simple, yet powerful CMS
• A great collection of plugins that manage and automate many of my most tedious tasks, leaving me free to produce great content
• My biggest modification is to provide a lot more space for advertising with a new 4-column theme

The above list of benefits are a very short list and cover just the benefits of my upgrade. The actual benefits from WordPress are two numerous and will take another 10 posts to mention.

When you start your blog, the more time and resources that you utilize to build your success, there is no better way to get started than with your own domain, hosted at a great provider, such as WebHostGiant.COM with WordPress running.

Now, I’d bet that you need a Step by Step, Make Money Online, Start up Plan? Success!

Carpe Diem,

Rich Sage