Archive for August, 2008

How to Create a Blog - Part 2

August 29th, 2008 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

This series of articles on how to create a blog is being written to help you develop a blog that will bring visitors back over and over again.  We are setting up a blog called “Current Events Online” to act as a demonstration for this series of articles.  Current Events Online will eventually be made available on Blogs For Sale in the event that you are interested in purchasing a blog that is already set up.

In this article we are going to talk briefly about plugins.  WordPress plugins help you to customize your site to make it function the way you want it to.  I am going to suggest the following 8 plugins as a minimum for your blog.  You may want to add others.  All of them can be found at the WordPress.org plugin database and are available for free.

Advanced Category Excluder - With this plugin you can define categories for some parts of the site to be hidden.

Akismet -  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All in One SEO Pack -  Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.

Contact Form 7 - Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

EasyDonation - PayPal Donation Management plugin.

Exclude Pages from Navigation - Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation.

Official StatCounter Plugin - Adds the StatCounter tracking code to your blog.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

Each of these plugins will be very useful in developing your blog.  We will talk about how these plugins can be used for the maximim effect in later articles.  Go ahead and get these plugins downloaded and activated on your blog.  If you need help with that process you read the articles on Starting a Blog From Scratch available right here on My Newbie Blog.

How to Create a Blog - Part 1

August 25th, 2008 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

This site is filled with articles about how to create a blog.  From the very basic “starting a blog from scratch” information, to developing “niche sites”, to getting your blog recognized by the search engines.  We provide this information for free to everyone who just wants to get started in the blogosphere.  My Newbie Blog has two sister sites, Blog Consulting and Blogs For Sale, where you can receive help for any blogging questions you have at very reasonable rates.

In this “How to Create a Blog” series of articles we are going to talk about how to make your blog one of those sites that people keep coming back to.  Return visitors to your site are a key element in developing a successful blog.  We will create a blog called “Current Events Online” to use for demonstration purposes.

We will assume that you know how to get a domain name and web host and be able to get your site to the generic Kubrik theme provided by WordPress.org.  (If you need help with any of these things, read the articles on this site about “How to Start a Blog”).

Let’s get started.  We are going to install a theme to help us begin to get noticed by the search engines.  For this project we will be using a theme called Dateless Sniper by Courtney Tuttle.  This theme is simple to use and is very good with the search engines.  I think it is a good theme to use in the beginning of your blog.  After you have your blog well developed and situated you can change the theme.  The Dateless Sniper theme will allow for an easy transition to a different theme later on.  In our next article we will discuss adding some plugins.