Simple Guide To Starting a WordPress Blog
Last week, we looked at reasons why you should encourage your students to setup their own blogs. Today, we are going to take a look at exactly how they can create their first professional wordpress blog. By teaching them exactly what is contained here, you can help them develop their online presence.
Buy domain name and pay for hosting
The domain is the first thing they will decide on. If any of your students find it difficult to settle for a name, direct them to this article on choosing a domain for your blog. After arriving at a domain, the next step is choosing a webhost. The best web hosting companies in the UK offer cheap and powerful blog hosting solutions that allows seamless wordpress integration/installation.
Choose a theme
Choosing a theme is all about making your blog look great for visitors, whilst making navigation and usability terrific. There are many free wordpress themes that can serve the purpose but students that would rather pay for a premium theme can also do so. Paid themes offer a lot more features than free ones in most cases, and they look better.
Micro-details
Even the best theme designs are done with a general view so it is important to spend some time tinkering with it to get the right look and feel. Delete parts of the theme that don’t appeal to you and add new categories, pages, etc. to get the desired end product. The next thing is to focus on other details, such as setting up a feedburner account for people that will want to subscribe to the blog via email and RSS, as well as signing up for Google Analytics to keep tabs on visitor statistics. The signing up processes for both Google Analytics and Feed Burner are very easy.
The student can also design logos and header images if they can, but this can be left for later, when the blog has started attracting readers.
Installation of plugins
Plugins are important tools for every wordpress owner. There are many wordpress plugins to choose from, but, for beginners, a simple social media share plugin and the Google Analytics for WordPress plugins should be the first two installations. Social media share plugins are important if visitors are to be able to easily share content from the blog and the Google Analytics plugin presents you with all the stats you will need in a one window. This article pinpoints some other great plugins for wordpress blogs. It is well worth a read.
Content
This is the last stage of setting up a blog, although you could of course be thinking about it from the beginning. The student can start writing and uploading content for all the pages on the blog. This includes content for pages like the “About” “Contact” as well as actual blog posts on the focus of the blog.
After these steps the blog is up and running and can start attracting visitors! Time to start talking and posting in social media.
