No More Excuses: Set Up Your Own Website

Blogger (service)

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You don’t have your own website?  Well, it’s time that you do something about that.  Frankly, it’s very easy to do these days.

The options are many.  Too many probably.  How do you sort through them?

Well, here are are a few preliminary options, most of them with samples I’ve set up [or tried to set up] — or which friends have established.  The major attraction is that each can be set up within minutes simply by selecting from an array of themes and elements to include.

Blogger.com:  This is one of the grand-daddys.  Sign up is simple.  And it’s free.  Lots of writers have placed their blogs here.  The disadvantage:  your blog is located at a “sub-domain.”  That meams “blogspot.com” shows up as the root domain, with your domain tacked on at the beginning:  SubDomain.Domain.com, for example.  Still it’s not a bad option.  My own first blog was placed there, just to give me some experience with the blogging routine.  Take a look at my first effort:  How To Write History.

WordPress.com:  Another free option, a direct competitor of Blogger.  Of course I’ve got a blog there too, even though I never use it.  This free service is not to be confused with the much more powerful WordPress platform that must be placed on a hosting service, with a paid-for domain name.  Personally, I think this free service is a very good place to begin.  You can graduate later to a more fully developed platform.

WetPaint.com:  My next quick and easy website evolved after watching a 12-year-old manage quite a sophisticated site there.  Well, if he could do it, I could too.  Within an hour, I created what I consider a rather well developed website at The World Beyond.  I seldom maintian it; it was set up primarily as a demonstration site about 7 months ago.  Still, just 2 days ago, I got a notice that this site had 150 visitors in November!  If you visit, you will uncover some very personal stuff.  While setting up this site, suddenly an outpouring of pent-up emotion filled the site within an hour — with posts, audio, video.  I’m impressed with this facility.  For those in the know, my EMO side erupted full-force.

Multiply.com:  This facility is most popular among Filipinos.  Surprisingly, Filipinos are very computer literate.  It’s the cellphone texting capital of the world.  And the country ranks very high among users of blogs and social media.  I know:  I live in Manila for most of the year.  Anyway, when I discovered a friend using this facility, I decided to try it out.  Within minutes, I had my own Multiply.com website up and running:  Pen and Harmonica – Tom Colvin’s Tools of Choice.

SnapPages.com:  I’ve just wasted an hour trying out this new facility.  I’m reasonably adept at these things — and I just couldn’t just any satisfaction from it at all.  My SnapPages site never took shape.  It’s a newcomer — I guess it still has to grow up.

Joomla.com:  This facility is known as a Content Management facility.  It too is beoming very popular.  It’s a very modular type tacility — lots of content options — you just chose what you want and plug it in.  My brother George, an artist with NO computer savvy, hired an acquaintance to set up his website:  George Colvin – Artist.  Joomla is a current heavy-weight in the web presence business, as George’s website-in-progress demonstrates.  It does require a hosting service and a domain name — that’s not free, and it does take some knowledge to run.  but it’s powerful.  if you need a domain and web host, I can recommend Hostgator.comsdazw very highly — reasonable cost, fairly easy to manage.

IMPORTANT ISSUE:  Many of the free website facilities offer sites at a SUB-DOMAIN.  That means you show up as http://YOURSITE.hostdomain.com.  The host domain may be Blogger, Wordpress, WetPaint, etc.  These domains are not as “valuable” as top-level domains — but they are free!  I personally think these facilities are a good way to dip into the website world.  They are mostly easiy to use and cost not a penny.  Once you’ve learned the ropes, you may wish to “graduate” into somethign more powerful, more pseronal, more visible.

My blog, for example, is hosted on a hired server utilizing the popular WordPress.org platform, the more mature sibling of WordPress.com [NOTE the different address extensions], and i have my own top-level domain name.  If you are really serious, you’ll end up with something similar.  Maybe I’ll post about these options later on.

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