Blogging on Blogging

As a web designer I always want to know the statistics on any website’s use.

How did visitors find the website?

What are the looking at?

How long do they stay on the website?

And so on…

There are a hundred and one uses for any or all of this information.

There are also numerous web statistics programs, websites and add-ons. I will write about some of these at a later stage – but for now; setting up your new blog, I recommend putting Google Analytics  onto your website.

Visit the Google Analytics website. You will need to register and give details of your website. Google will then give you a piece of code that you need to put into your website.

In the folder wp-content/themes/whatever-theme-you-have you will usually find a file called footer.php . Open this file, scroll down until you find the end of body tag. Just before this copy and paste the code Google gave you. Save and upload the file and you are away!

Google will update your stats daily and give you more than enough information to start tracking how well your website is doing!

Tags: Footer, Google, Google Analytics, Web Designer, Web Statistics, Web Stats, Website Statistics, Website Tracking

I’m not talking here about what you will be writing about!

This is about how your blog will look. Fortunately, you do not have to be a whizz at web design to have a great looking blog!

Visit the Wordpress Themes Directory; here you will find tens of thousands of excellent themes to download and use – all for FREE.

You will, at this point, need to be able to upload these files to your server.

To do this you should either download a FREE FTP client – FileZilla is just one example – or you can use an online file manager control panel that many servers provide for free with their web hosting.

Upload the folder containing your theme (having extracted it on your own computer) to the folder wp-content/themes.

Then visit your website / blog. Log in and click on Appearance on the left hand menu.

Choose the theme you have uploaded and you are away.

I will write more on themes, widgets and so on later – for now, keep writing your content.

Tags: FileZilla, FTP Client, Web Hosting, Wordpress, Wordpress Appearence, Wordpress Themes, Wordpress Widgets

Here are my steps to setting up a new blog.

(I use Wordpress, but there are several other very good blogging platforms out there.)

Buy a Domain Name.
I use RddR Web Design & Hosting, but there are lots of other providers out there. Don’t pay over £10 for a .co.uk domain name, and double-check the price doesn’t increase at renewal time.

Get some Web Hosting
Again I use RddR but there are even more web hosting companies out there than domain providers. Lots of things to be careful of, if in doubt look for a more reputable alternative!

Install Wordpress
Many web hosting companies provide very simple one-click installation of Wordpress and other blogging platforms on their servers. This saves having to download and upload the package in the first instance.

Start Writing!
The important thing about blogging is to get into the routine of writing right from the start. You can change the appearance, add adverts and affiliate links and everything else at any point – but unless the content is there, you are wasting your time. Get writing straight away!

I will obviously expand upon each of these over the next week or two, but let’s be clear about this – starting blogging is not hard. You can do it all for free if you wish – but for the sake of £20, you can start out professionally and be well on your way to a blogging income.

Tags: .co.uk Domain, Blogging Income, Blogging Platforms, Buying Domain Names, RddR Web Design & Hosting, Routine of Writing, Web Hosting, Wordpress, Wordpress Installation