In this post I want to give a rough guide to the blog environment. I’m using WordPress to do my blogging because it is known all around the world.
Although I am pretty good when it comes to technology I was scared to delve in at first as I didnt know the software, but I am glad I did because I now use it on 3 websites of my own.

WordPress is free and you can get your own URL for your blog. I recommend buying a domain to host it on but that is the easy part. WordPress can be accessed from anywhere as it is an online platform. Usually your website address for logging in to your blog will be:
http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/blogname/wp-login.php
From there you can do all your normal blogging and maintenance and start to build yourself a mini community.

Here is a lowdown to get you understanding WordPress:

Posting

Big topics can be split into groups and categories. WordPress lets you assign your own categories and tags.
Categories are different from tags. Categories are to do with what groups a certain number of posts together in a wider range and tags are to do with what sort of things are mentioned in the blog.
For example if I had a blog about celebrities, I would have each celebrity I wrote a post about as a category and in each post I’d have tags to give a quick brief single word ‘summary’ of what you would expect from that post.

Media uploading

You can upload media (pictures) to make your blog pretty and break up text on your blog. Media is a great way of helping your readers to understand what it is that you are blogging about.

Blog themes

You can use blog themes to ‘wallpaper’ your blog. When you are ready for a challenge you can mess around with these themes and change anything that you want. If you are even more clever you can write your own.
There is a big library of themes to choose from and explore, and you can buy themes later on when you cant see any free ones that you like.

Plugins

A Plugin is a mini program that sits inside your blog till you want to use it. You can use a Plugin to stop spam occurring when people comment. Spam is usually comments that are not related to the post or blog and must be deleted. You have complete control of this in WordPress. Remember to check back often to see if the Plugin that you have got has been updated. Sometimes there will be a complete WordPress update and that may give you new features.

Blogging with WordPress is the easiest that I have come across yet. There is so much out there to help you have the best blog on the web!

Simple Jargon
Blog(n): Where you write your valuable information
Blogging(v): A way to convey thoughts and feelings to the world
Blogger(n)/Bloggers(plural n): Someone who writes content
Post: A single article on a blog

In this first part I cover essential tips for blogging, with my simple 4 part strategy known as EAPI.
In the second part I talk about WordPress and special features to make your blogging life more stress free.
Finally, in the third part I sympathise with bloggers and share ways to keep your blog stable and how to market your blog.

My simple system should get you well on your way to starting and maintaining a great blog: Remember – Experience Audience Point Inform

Blog To Share Experience

Blog on a topic you know about, and be sensible about the information you write. Explore and experiment with your blog content as putting the barriers up will stop exploration onto similar subjects. Keeping an open mind is great for blogging. Also, if readers understand what you are talking about you will gain respect and praise and maybe people will comment on your work. Research is key!

The phrase KISS will come in handy: Keep It Simple Stupid/Silly

Consider Your Audience

Be yourself and be chatty to make people feel at ease. Writing with passion will help your readers relax. If you need to be serious then this is also nice occasionally to keep the balance. Blogging for a teen audience is different to blogging for the older generation.

If your blog is for young people you can make the blog look funky and let your creativity flow. Older people may find that a blog with a hundred different colours is confusing. Avoid colour clashes with older audiences, instead go for subtle colours.

Keep To The Point

Keep each post short and to the point. If needed you can split the topic that you write about into multiple posts so you can post the rest another day. This prevents confused readers getting overloaded with information and navigating away from your site. This is mainly why I am splitting this blogging topic into 3 posts. Highlight key areas in BOLD to illustrate really important things.

Keep Audience Informed

Deciding to blog is a great thing and once you know what sort of atmosphere you want to create you are well on your way to success. However, blogs get forgotten if you haven’t written anything for a long time. Keep people up to date with news items and you will be popular and you may even see other bloggers write or talk about your work.

Escaping Bloggers Block

Keep a notepad handy to write post ideas in for later. This way you can jot down what interests you which will help posting when you lack content.
Look on other forums/blogs (search on Google) for advice and think about the future of your blog. This will help you to decide on the direction of future posting.

Good Luck!

However I must say I love this new version.

I think that Mozilla have got the tabs in the correct place this time to allow for the new App Tabs, which are absolutely awesome must I say… I like it because you can have as many of these things as you like and you dont have to even install anything extra! What a great idea! App Tabs give you room for all your tabs so you dont have to close them to work on other sites which uses, yes you guessed it : more tabs! I think that this should have been in the 3rd version of Firefox because I am a very heavy Firefox user and working on a computer doing my daily routine of Twitter and Facebook and Email etc became IMPOSSIBLE when I also had several Youtubes and other interest sites up as well!!

All your bookmarks come in automatically which is great so you dont have to worry about importing them.

In this new version of Firefox you can group your tabs in relevance so you only see the items in that particular window at one time. For example if you had a load of Youtube videos that you wanted to watch and you had not got round to doing it you could group them and store them for later and continue working on other things without tab-clutter!
Managing them is easy: just drag the thumbnails in Panorama view to a free space in Firefox to make groups and then add more thumbnails to the groups by dragging thumbnails onto other thumbnails. Even make thumbnail space by drawing the box first! You can even name the groups so that you know what is in them.

However in this version there is no status bar and if like me you like to see how well the page is loading you can download add-ons for it. Firefox may change this in the future but until a proper 100% stable Firefox 4 comes I dont think we will see a change!

These are the some of the biggest and best changes to the browser to date with the option of it evolving into something even greater in later versions! Sadly it wont cook your dinner or sing to you yet, but I daresay Mozilla are working on that right now !

I am getting really annoyed at my hotmail friends accounts which keep on sending me spam emails…. so I urge now for people to use Google Mail (Gmail in the UK) for their Emails. Here’s why:

• Users can create documents online and share them with friends
• Users have a cleaner less hectic mail space (useful for businesses!)
• Users can easily see and add people to their buddy lists
• Users get less spam and more space (and counting.. (google says))
• Great mobile access
• Quick loading
• Threaded conversations in Emails
• Ability to have Youtube account linked to your mail
• Google Buzz (Video of GBuzz)
• Share photos and much more!
• Save chat history online instead of on your PC…Also download a desktop client for chat if you want to!
• Vacation responder – for people when they are away from a PC
• Forwarding for emails (POP and IMAP)
• and loads loads more!

So there is lots of different things to try out in GoogleMail so go and sign up, have a play and tell me I’m right!

I decided to go look at another free webs package from webs.com to see how free for all designing has changed and what you can expect from them. Will free website hosting completely disappear because of the lack of interest and wanting more options or will they continue to thrive into little online cities that govern themselves!?

When I made an account on Webs.com I was pleased at how easy it was to set up and get started adding things.

The things I like about it are:

• Easy quick photo albums… no code to worry about
• Ability to upgrade to a .com address if your site takes off well. (charges may incur straight away to your bank/building society)
• Stats for website which is hosted by a company called Clicky.com and it even allows for Twitter search. You can easily opt out of this. But I wont be going into detail about that as it isn’t what I am focussing on…
• Easy file uploader that can have multiple files sent in each upload… The files are shown in a nice clear way. In this website builder you can upload files by email which some free hosts will not allow… Even the free Geocities wouldnt let people connect using FTP!
• The format for a free site on Webs.com is http://yoursitename.webs.com/. Personally I think that is rather good as on Geocities free it would be your email address as the url which is a pain in the neck as people can spam your email and you can end up on a black list. so format for that is http://youremailaddress/index.htm
• Some Google account abilities from Google Webmaster.
• Email notification for numerous things including guestbook comments and new site members.
• WYSIWYG editing which is useful for people who can’t code in straight HTML.
• Community Forum where topics surrounding your site can be discussed and evaluated by others….
• Search Engine Optimisation for adding your site to Google and Yahoo etc which helps to be found easier. Site linking and sharing are part of the deal.
• Add social networks to your site so others can see what you are doing elsewhere: Twitter and Facebook integration. Members integration with Email Blasts so you can notify of new posts. Facebook Connect available.

Payments may incur when you decide the following:

• Google Adwords and custom display ads with iPromote.
• PayPal E-commerce (package details vary accordingly to what you have decided upon.)
• There are premium packages for more webspace and tools. Domain names only available on the Enhanced and Pro accounts. Multi email addresses also.

As a free website maker the free tools that are available are quite advanced to what other free makers are. If you want the site forever then I’d suggest you pay to get premium benefits and ways to enhance your site.

Main twitter is still GoldChoiceUK.

I may be able to ask questions and get answers but I think it is how they answer and communicate which can be the problem.

If they dont know exactly what you can do for them, help them by giving a mini CV of the sort of things that you can produce.

I had this sort of a problem with Rayna Disabled Rider where I knew what needed to be done but the client didnt seem to know what she wanted which made me uneasy. I had some people there to help me with it but if they were not there I’d have probably not taken the challenge very easily.

The other thing that annoys me is when little tweaks need to be made to a site and they assume I know exactly what they want in place and I dont unless they tell me.

I also love clients because they help others see what I am capable of and may help me to develop my already learned skills or even learn new ones!

So when you next book time (very precious) with a client, then use it to gain as much knowledge as you can about the task in hand. If you can then ask the same question a million different ways!

So far we have looked at ways to get feedback and the feedback you may experience.

In this final part I would like to go through how you can approach changes and how to maintain a healthy site.

With all the feedback you have (if a large amount) it may be a good idea to put it into one document to pick over.

I submit my sites for review on Twitter as I have followers that specailise in design reading my feed there. The more places, and people, you submit the url to the more views you will get from different people thus helping your design skills.

My tip: The feedback I get I could do what I described above but in Windows Vista I like to use the Snipping Tool. With that I don’t have to worry about the ‘have I copied/pasted that’ problem because I’ll have the data in .jpg format. Then I can disregard all of the pointless comments. If they are major changes they will need to be done first. Small tweeks wont be as noticable so they can be done later on.

You may like to thank your friends for helping you as they are a good second-eye for spotting mistakes, and I know I miss them occasionally.

Finally when all the hard work is done you can relax and let visitors come to your page. However… one slight catch… to maintain a healthy site you should update it often. Maybe you could have a set day in the month where you check for broken links or you may want to add new features… all to keep people interested!

You could add:
A blog – assuming current site is only a showcase
A forum – depending on type of site
You come up with something more fantastic than I can? Tell Me!

I hope you have enjoyed my 3 part blog post topic- I hope to do one again sometime.

So now you have made your site and you have hopefully used a method of getting some feedback that I described in my last article.

Now I want to tell you about types of feedback and how you may view them.

I’ve already made a few sites and submitted them for public review. I was amazed by the views that people had of them. They did like them and a few were giving me quite a bit of useful info. For example on one site they mentioned how spacing could make it look better.

Just accepting feedback is good but if all you are getting is ‘your site is good/bad’ then maybe you need to select more carefully who exactly you show the site to and who you market it for. You may need to do major tweeking.

All the marketing can be decided before you make the site as long as you get it out there and show the world how good your new site is!

If you are being criticised then always have an open mind and be ready to make site changes. That will be covered in the third and final installment of this series.

With positive comments coming your way there is nothing to worry about and you can pat yourself on the back!
However dont get too down if you have negative comments because they may help you to become a better designer.
No responses lead to a feeling of rejection so choose tthe best feedback method for you!

In the final part: Making change

I have tried flash layouts, frames, tables and layers in the hope that I would stick to a particular design. I have found that working with layers is the best way for me as I can use CSS to define the location and other style properties of items on the page.

My different layouts ALL had pros and cons to them, which I´d like to talk about here now.

The first layout consisted of only Macromedia Flash. Straight away I hear alarm bells ringing because some search engines will not pick up on Flash-only sites. I had a very curvy design for it. Later I gave the main menu the drag ability, so it could be moved around within the Flash movie. All this happened between March 2006 and December 2006.

Soon I started to listen to Boagworld.com´s podcasts, and listening to ´The Great Flash Debate´, I finally was persuaded that I should have a HTML alternative. I think that having Flash is good as most browsers/computers support that content, but a Flash-only option is not enough. So I got to work on that straight away.
During my experimenting I used frames for a while, but then I found out that some people turn frames off, thus stopping the site working if you don´t have an alternative layout. I found this a little stupid, but it all made sense. If anyone really prefers a frames layout for their site, (they are not *very* common now) I can say I know how to do them!
Frames are quite useful though as you can fit a lot into them because they will scroll if there is more than a page of text. If you have hundreds and thousands of links then you can get to them easily.

Then I used a table based design and things were much more simple. However you can only really position them in 3 places normally (left, right and centre). Later in 2007 (July/August), I decided to learn a bit of CSS, so that I could colour and position them where I want regardless of the limitations of normal HTML. This again enhanced my knowledge and reading a 400 page book certainly taught me well. I haven´t finished it yet as I have been changing my site too much.
Then I realised something was missing.

Into my life came DIV´s, a layers format, and everything was more user friendly. A DIV can be positioned anywhere you like and can even nest. All my sites are now designed with a DIV layout and I only use tables for things like data that has to be listed a certain way.

If you think this article was interesting or have something to say about it please comment!