How to Design a Free Blogging Website
If you're new to blogging and want to set up a free blogging website, chances are you've got questions about how to go about doing so. Luckily, most free blogging services are easy to use and offer a variety of templates or themes for you to get started right away. To make a few simple modifications, let's take a look at two of the most common free blogging sites: Blogger and Wordpress.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Blogger is one of the easiest free blogging sites to set up and use, especially now that it's owned by Google. If you already have a Gmail account, you can easily set up a Blogger account that uses your Gmail login information. Blogger accounts will give you a personal web address with whatever name you choose followed by "blogspot.com," like "http://insertnamehere.blogspot.com." To get started, go to Blogger.com and set up your account.
-
2
Wordpress is just as easy to use as Blogger, if you're using one of their free accounts, although if you want to add a Wordpress blog to an existing website, you'll have to be a bit more familiar with HTML, FTP and MySQL databases. For now, we'll just discuss the free, stand-alone version of Wordpress, which you can easily sign up for at Wordpress.com. Your Wordpress account will have a URL that involves "wordpress.com," such as "http://insertnamehere.wordpress.com."
-
-
3
For people who prefer pre-designed templates and an easy-to-use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface, Blogger is your best bet. It's fast and simple to set up multiple blogs and tend to each one through your personal dashboard, and since it's tied to your Gmail account, you won't forget the passwords. If you're going to allow several different people to post on your blog, it's easy to add multiple users, and you can adjust your privacy settings to either allow everyone access or restrict access to up to 100 specific people.
Wordpress offers many of the same options, though you may need to know a bit more about RSS and HTML code to set up some of the optional widgets (including configuring your blog to publish your Twitter feed). On the other hand, Wordpress has a great web statistics system that will help you see how many people visit your blog on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, for how long, and which pages they viewed. If your goal is monitoring your traffic, you may prefer Wordpress for this reason. Also, Wordpress offers the option to keep track of your blog posts by category, rather than simply by the date you posted them, which can make searching frequently-updated blogs a lot easier.
-
4
Whichever option you choose, both Blogger and Wordpress offer a variety of unique designs that are sure to catch your fancy. Blogger's templates are generally much simpler than Wordpress's themes, so if you prefer designs that look more artistic or professionally designed, you might prefer Wordpress. Blogger's templates, however, will allow you to do virtually anything with them, providing you know enough HTML to edit the code, whereas Wordpress requires users to pay an additional fee to manipulate the CSS code.
Wordpress offers 72 themes to choose from, some of which allow users to create customized headers with photographs and/or the title of your blog. You can choose between themes with between one and four columns, as well as fixed or variable-width set-ups. Bottom widgets and custom colors are also available on certain themes. Since the code can't be edited in free Wordpress blogs, the number of free themes available is an important factor.
Blogger offers 16 different templates, some of which are available in different color combinations; each template offers the same customization options, which makes it slightly easier to choose a design. The colors may not be your favorite, but it's simple enough to customize them once you've decided on a template. Just click the "Fonts and Colors" tab to choose from its web-friendly palette.
-
5
Once you've chosen your basic template (in Blogger), you can play with various gadgets. Add or delete gadgets by clicking the "Page Elements" tab under "Layout." Basic gadgets that are indispensable include Blog Archive, Link List (for listing links to other websites and blogs) and Profile (which will give people the information you've listed on your profile page). There are tons of other gadgets to choose from, including those that will allow you to post photos, slide shows, videos, RSS feeds and other interactive widgets. Decide which are the most important to you and add them to your page. You can even move them around as you see fit.
In Wordpress, you can make similar changes to the widgets. Depending on the theme you've chosen, you may have multiple columns, and you can add widgets to each of these columns. Decide whether you prefer to spread things out or keep them all in one column. You may even want to arrange your widgets based on some theme (for example, all of your archiving widgets can be in one column and all links in another). There are fewer widgets to choose from than there are gadgets, but since all of the widgets are made by Wordpress, they are guaranteed to work. Some of Blogger's gadgets, on the other hand, are made my third parties, so they may not always work properly.
-
6
If you're tired of the free templates and themes offered by Blogger and Wordpress, there are lots of different places to acquire new designs. BlogSkins.com and Blogger Templates both offer a variety of interesting designs for Blogger, whereas Blog Fashions offer blog themes for Wordpress. Wordpress also offers additional themes for those who are tired of the standards on their website.
-
1
