Here goes my first attempt at blogging. Alex is in full blog mode already so it’s going to be hard to keep up, but I think I’m up to the challenge. Unfortunately for many of you my posts will more technically focused; how I’ve created and configured the blog, tools I’m using, useful websites, etc… I’m only going to apologize once; it’s what I enjoy doing and subsequently writing about so you’ll just have to deal with it. Hopefully there will be a few interested parties who either want to do something similar or share their advice with me. Now that we’ve got the formalities out of the way let’s move on.

WordPress

Why WordPress? Simply enough, it seemed to be the industry standard from what I could tell in my research. By research I mean Googling. Off topic for a moment, but do you think Googling should be classified as a skill? I think it should. I often ask interviewees this question. Many of them are a bit perplexed by the idea at first but through some prodding they come to the understanding that in our field it is extremely difficult to know everything about a particular programming language, software, browser, etc… and if you can find the specific nugget of information you’re looking for in a shorter amount of time than your colleagues it might be classifiable as a skill. You should Google the term ‘Googling, or ‘Is Googling A Skill’, it’s interesting. Back to the topic at hand, WordPress seemed like the best choice for our needs, it has a well established blogging framework, easy to navigate admin section, a plethora of free templates and utilities (plugins) and was easy enough to learn in a day or two such that I could customize our site to our liking. If you know PHP you’ll be able to easily understand WordPress. Plus WordPress is Open Source, which I tend to prefer (that’s a whole other topic). Check out the history and documentation for more information.

Free WordPress Templates

When starting our site I immediately gravitated towards free WordPress templates for three reasons; I didn’t want to waste the time to create a WordPress site from scratch, there are plenty of free templates available online (I’ve listed a number of sites below that I perused in my search) and of course they’re free. There are also plenty of WordPress themes that cost a pretty penny and most likely worth it (better SEO management, customization, etc…), but my suggestion when starting a blog is to limit as much of the overhead costs as possible. Most bloggers warn that making money blogging takes months to years to see decent returns, so I figured we’d start small and see what happens. I focused on free WordPress templates which already contained customization for Google Adsense.

• 18 Adsense Optimized WordPress to Maximize you Contextual Ad Earnings
• 21 Free AdSense-Ready WordPress Themes

Once we decided on a theme (honestly this took over two weeks as Alex and I have different opinions on look and feel) I installed WordPress on my local machine to get better handle on it. It wasn’t too difficult and the WordPress documentation helped a ton. To be honest, the basics of a WordPress site are rather simplified for the user which is great. There are few things you must do and the rest is styling and customization.

Bluehost Hosting

After deciding on the theme it was time to purchase a site and hosting services. I had used Bluehost before (davealexwedding.com – sadly we didn’t keep this site going) so I was comfortable with them and after some more quick ‘research’ I found them to still be one of the top rated hosting sites. The price was good ($4.95 / month for a 12 month contract) and WordPress installation is literally a one click setup. The total time for purchasing the site, installing WordPress, uploading our files and the site being up took a couple of hours. It’s still a little early to report on any down time or customer service issues so we’ll see how it goes.

That covers the initial setup of the blog. Overall it took us approximately two weeks and most of that as I said was deciding on a theme. For the most part it was a pretty painless process and having done it once I could easily get a blog setup in as little as a day. However, since the blog has been up I have done quite a bit of customization, Adsense and SEO management that have proven to be a little more difficult. I’m still working on these areas and hope to have a post up shortly with more in depth information on how we are approaching these areas and how that affects our progress of reaching our goals.

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