As I mentioned in my post about “Blogging – Step 2 – Hosting a blog“, a preferred way to blog is to subscribe to a web hosting company, and host your own blogging platform. I personally use WordPress as my platform. I FULLY recommend this software as there is just so much you can do with it. Here is a bit of a description from the WordPress homepage:
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.
So, some of the many things that I like about WordPress?:
- You can VERY easily change the theme (template) that WordPress uses using one of the MANY free WordPress themes
- You can easily modify the way your site looks, even changing the template’s code to suit your needs (assuming you are allowed to)
- Upgrading WordPress is a simple, 2 minute process – this might be needed if you encounter any bugs that are fixed in later versions
- WordPress caters for non-english languages using special localization features
- Supports RSS feed creation
- There are a lot of WordPress plugins that enhance the functionality of WordPress, adding features such as Spam protection, backup, and much much more.
There are a lot of other features about WordPress that I will touch upon later. And I hope to be able to teach you some tips and tricks to customizing WordPress, including making WordPress Search Engine friendly…