Freelance Business Writing

Keeping in mind that I am woefully late to the blogging game, and that this blog is intended for small business owners who lack an IT department/local computer geek/marketing budget and must set up their own blog, I will endeavour to share my opinion of common blogging tools. Well, the two common blogging tools that I have used. Added bonus – both are free.

First is blogger.com. Owned by Google, Blogger is easy to use and quick to set up. Visit blogger.com, click Create Your Blog Now and you’re off. The dashboard (the interface where you add and manage your posts and settings) is clearly laid out and easy to follow. For novices, Blogger is a great tool. It helps get your feet wet in the world of blogging.

Blogger is an external host. That is, the blog is not hosted directly on your Website. You can change your Blogger settings to move the blog to your site but I found this task difficult. In all fairness, this is not Blogger’s fault. The change involved something called a CNAME and I couldn’t find a setting to change it in the clunky interface of my Web domain provider (the organization I bought my domain name from). Since I have a moderate level of technical expertise and I couldn’t figure this out, my advice to any non-technical people is that you may need a good IT or Web person with you to help.

You could also do what I did. Instead of having to bother with the CNAME, I just switched blog tools. I now use WordPress and I love it. You need a moderate level of technical expertise set up WordPress, but once you do, it is great to use. WordPress also makes it easy to host your blog on your site, if you have that bit of technical knowledge that I mentioned.

Note that to create a WordPress blog in your site, you need some knowledge of the folllowing:

• adding a subdomain to your site – not necessary if your entire site is a blog, but definitely needed if you want an address like http://www.tigerlilymedia.ca/blog/
• adding a SQL database to your site and adding a user with full access rights
• editing the WordPress config file to include your SQL database, user name and password
• changing other areas of the config file, including a bunch of authentication numbers that have to be both long and unique (luckily WordPress has a tool to generate these numbers)
• transferring WordPress files to your Website

Once the files are on your site you can access the dashboard from within your site. WordPress provides you an admin password to use for logging in on the WordPress admin page associated with your site. From there, the dashboard is straightforward to use.

WordPress is open source and people are always adding new plugins to use with it. There are also a ton of templates to choose from to enhance the look of your blog. As a moderately technical user who likes to keep things simple, I recommend WordPress highly.