Well, it appears the blogosphere is here to stay.
As such, it's probably high time you get your little buns in gear and grab a domain name before they're all taken, and think about slapping something — anything! — up there just to prove you're a citizen of the 21st century.
The bottom line is, you're probably going to get online sometime, so you might as well have at least a meager selection of domain names to choose from. Every minute you wait could mean that yourname.com will be taken. And the domain name is free if you go through the link below, and so's the software, and the site, itself, only costs $6.95/mo to host, so it isn't like it's some big wallet-killer. You got any other bills that low?
The software we'll be using is called WordPress, and whether you want a blog site or a standard web site, the stuff can't be beat.
There are two places where it really shines:
— It does a great job of automatically organizing everything. Readers can hunt up older posts a number of ways and it has an outstanding search feature.
— But it's the 'themes' that can change the entire look of your site with a single mouse click, from cool-and-hip to snappy-business-professional, that set this software apart. There are literally thousands of them out there to choose from.
If you're away from home, you can write your posts on the laptop and then email them to the site when you get online, each one scheduled to display at a certain time.
And here's the thing:
Frank, my neighbor, knows almost nothing about computers and never dreamed in a million years that he'd one day set up a personal blog site, much less put photos of his boat on it, much less videos. But, over the course of a few hours, with a little help from moi, he did just that.
Frank is 84 years old.
And you know where this is going, right?
If ancient, creaky old Frank can manage this difficult, ponderous task, I'm betting that you can, too.
The jump-off point is Cool-Blogsite. That'll walk you through the entire process from this moment on. If you just want to dip a toe in the pond, it's real easy to get up and running. If you want to jump on in, it's "challenging, but not difficult" to tweak the site to your exact liking.
This would also make a wonderful gift for some not-so-computer-savvy member of the family. They might not have the know-how to set up a site, but anybody can hit the 'Save' button. Install a bunch of themes and watch their eyes light up when they see the big thumbnail preview pics and how easy it is to choose between them.
But back to the domain names, I was in some webmasters' forum the other day and they were bitching about how hard it is to find an unused name these days, even using a person's first, middle and last name. And it certainly makes sense, given the massive number of people getting online and wanting their own domains.
As I said, it's real easy using WordPress just to get online and establish a 'beachhead'. The main idea is to nail down your domain name while it's still available. Click on the above link and just take care of steps #1 and #2. That's your 'beachhead', then you can relax and continue at your leisure.
Any questions, please ask in the comments.
