Business and Blogging

Practical Guide for Setting Up a WordPress Blog

by Des Walsh on August 21st, 2007

On Sarah Lewis’ new WordPress QuickStart site there is a set of excellent videos to help even the most non-technical person get up and running with a WordPress site.

Sarah is a blog developer and one of my co-moderators on the LinkedIn Bloggers forum.

Note that the site is about installing a downloadable WordPress.org site, not a WordPress.com site. They are both from the same company, but for business people the WordPress.org option is the way to go. WordPress.com has blogs hosted by the WordPress company and has terms of service which I and others find unduly constraining for a business blog. For more on that, see 15 Benefits and Limitations of a WordPress.com Blog and note especially the following paragraph:

It is essential you read up the terms of service carefully. They will not tolerate copyright infringement, spamming, commercial use, machine generated blog etc. and people can easily report spam blogs and you might wake up to find your blog deleted one fine day!

Back to WordPress QuickStart.

I wish this site and its videos had been available way back when I was futzing around trying to make sense of well-meant but essentially cryptic comments from WordPress aficionados, such as that “Fantastico” made it really easy to install WordPress. Well, yes, but that assumed you knew where to find Fantastico and how to use it properly when you got there.

With Sarah’s videos there is no need for anyone to experience the frustration I felt. These are really step-by-step and in plain English and it is like looking over Sarah’s shoulder as she demonstrates what you will see on the screen when you go through the steps. Nothing is left to guesswork. Which means of course that some people will find what is here really obvious. But the videos have been produced for people who won’t see the “obvious” as obvious. And that is great for the business person who wants to get into blogging and has heard enough about WordPress to want to use it, but does not want to have to go and do a technical course to do so.

Currently there are four videos:

Episode 1: How to choose and sign up for a web host for your WordPress blog

Episode 2: How to install WordPress using cPanel and Fantastico

Episode 3: Basic WordPress configuration

Episode 4: Creating posts and pages in WordPress

There is a promise of others to follow.

If all this is too basic for you, bookmark it for your friends and colleagues - it will save you a lot of time explaining and hand-holding!

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POSTED IN: Blogging, Blogging Platforms, General, Resources, Small Business