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You can create a post or a page either from within WordPress or with a blog writer. The WordPress posting feature means that you must be connected to your blog while you are editing. It is one less thing to get your head around before you get a bit of momentum going though.

They all have the same base features- you can insert links, images, format your text and do everything else you would expect. And they will do it in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) format, or xhtml format you you can generate the html yourself. Personally I’m learning enough and and using WYSIWYG so your are creating your post in the same sort of way as you would in word or something else.

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Once you have WordPress installed there are a few things to do to set it up and have it looking how you want before you get going. It is also a very good idea to go through some of the WordPress guides as you get started. Most stuff you do will be reflected in existing posts if you do it after you have written your first couple of things too.

There are a few things that will get you set up and making your site a bit more personalised:

• Change the URL to your top level domain
• Check the user posts as nickname
• Set your Permalink Structure
• General Settings
• Choose Your Theme

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This will take you through the simple steps to install WordPress. I’m assuming that you picked a webhost that has a one click install of WordPress using Fantastico (Fantastico is the platform most web hosts seem to use to install their pre-selected applications like WordPress).

Go to your web page (there will be a page put there by your web host) and login using your webhost username and password. My webhost didn’t send me my email and password when I signed up so I had to use the email username and password to get them.

When you log in you will be presented with your control panel. One of the icons will be the WordPress logo- it is under Popular Choices in mine. Click on this and the first WordPress installation page will be displayed.

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After you have chosen a blogging program, the next step is to choose who to host the blog. There are plenty of options out there,  it is just a matter of finding what suits. I had a few criteria

• One click install of WordPress (plenty do, so there was no point making it harder for myself)
• Able to handle multiple domains
• Unlimited space and bandwidth
• Able to handle multiple email domains, addresses and accounts
• Provided domain registration (at a price I could locate before I sign up)
• Price

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I’ve come into this with no prior knowledge, so I had no idea what was a available to support a blog. A quick google and I quickly became familiar with what I guess are the usual suspects- WordPress, Typepad, Movable Type, B2Evolution, Expression Engine, Drupal, Joomla.

Apparently the last 2 are considered Content Management Systems, but the make it into a lot of the conversations. This is what I looked at. read more »

I’ve talked on the About page about what I want to do with this blog, but I had to make a few decisions when I was setting up about how I was going to do it.

The first decision was whether to use a blogging platform or to get it hosted. I have gone for a hosted option. This is because

1. I have control over the domain

2. I want to run other domains (for email especially)

3. It is cheap anyway

4. I’ll probably want to do more with it over time

5. It’s not that hard

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