Blogging Archives

Blogging – publish your writing

October 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a selection of resources + how to get started

If you want to try the latest thing in Net publishing, it’s called Blogging. A Blog (short for Web Log) is usually a combination of a personal diary, links to items of interest on the Internet, a commentary on them, plus personal thoughts and essays. It is a form of self-publishing, and because you can write whatever you wish is very popular with authors who have strong and unorthodox opinions.

Blogging began as a medium for Web-based personal diaries, and most people still use it for this purpose. But some bloggers have started to develop the medium for what is essentially self-publishing. They might post notes reflecting briefly on a topic or discuss it with other bloggers, but they also upload essays, articles, or opinion pieces which count as serious pieces of journalism, expressing ideas and points of view which might not be available elsewhere.

The mainstream media (MSM) made fun of blogging when it first appeared – but now they can’t get enough of it. Newspapers, radio and TV stations, and magazines of all kinds have their own blogs – and they can’t get enough user-generated content either. That’s writing done by you and me, which they don’t have to pay for.

Some bloggers with access to popular information have suddenly found their hobby has been transformed into a thriving business. Paul Staines’ Guido Fawkes started as an amateur political gossip blog, but now gets 2 million visitors a month and makes him a full time living via advertising. Ric Turner’s Blue Moon did the same thing for supporters of Manchester City FC.

In fact the latest generation of bloggers at the time of writing are uploading digital photographs, video clips, and audio files – which have spawned the term podcasting. It’s also free and easy to do. You simply add your own text into a ready-made form and press the SEND button.

Essential Blogging offers a tour of the best blogging sites, how to upload and maintain your pages, and how to configure the options to get the best effects. A series of chapters, clearly written by enthusiasts, takes you through which Blog sites and software are available – from Blogger, Radio Userland (free software), Moveable Type, WordPress, and Blosxom. Some of these have developed rapidly beyond mere blogging tools into small-scale content management systems.

Are you likely to make an income from all this? Not directly – but there are all sorts of possible spin-offs. Lots of bloggers sign up as affiliates to Amazon, Google, and other commercial sites. They earn a small residual income from sending potential customers to buy books and software. Click one of the Amazon ads on this page, and you’ll see how it works.

There’s also the possibility of micro-payments. This is a system in which people are prepared to pay a small amount for downloading an article of interest. There’s still some resistance to this idea, but it’s now fairly common in downloading music files – so it might catch on.

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content Biz Stone covers most of these new possibilities in his book. He shows how to log onto the most popular site of all – Blogger – and establish your Web presence. Then he shows you how to add colour, text manipulation, and layout variety to your pages, then on to the serious business of making money.

There’s a chapter on arranging archives of your blogs, which can be done on a weekly or monthly basis. He also shows you how you can increase traffic to your blog. This text shows how to turn your home page into a microportal with fresh content to keep your readers coming back.

There are now all sorts of blogging support and development services springing up as the number of bloggers gets bigger and bigger. These range from online tutorials which will show you how to get set up — try BlogBasics — to tracking and site visitor statistics — try BlogFlux. And just to repeat the point yet again — it’s all free. If you want to see our blog, go to mantex.blogspot.com

The Weblog Handbook Rebecca Blood’s book is for anyone who has ever thought about starting a Weblog but isn’t sure how to post, where to find links, or even where to go to register. She certainly knows what she’s talking about, as you can see if you look at her own blog at RebeccaBlood.net.

She blogs regularly on topics which range from food and knitting to political activism and blogging itself. The Weblog Handbook is a clear and concise guide to everything you need to know about the phenomenon that is exploding on the Web. She expertly guides the reader through the whole process of starting and maintaining a Weblog and answers any questions that might pop up along the way, such as the elements of good Weblog design and how to find free hosting.

Blogging for Dummies Brad Hill’s advice is aimed at getting you up and running as quickly as possible – though he begins with what blogs are – and what they are not. He explains the different types of blogs, and how and why they are different from web sites. The good thing is that he looks at all the options and draws up comparison charts which show the features, cost, and options offered by the various providers and software programs.

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Blogging and Social Media

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

exploiting the technology and protecting the enterprise

This is a guide to blogging and social media with a difference. It’s aimed at professionals in business who might not have thought of using such communication techniques before. In fact it’s written by people with a background in law – which doesn’t at first seem like a zappy, media-conscious line of work to be in. But the first half of the book explains how blogs work; it outlines the plusses and minuses of blogging; shows you how to set up your own blog; and how to write and run it. The advice is clear and realistic.

You’ve got to be prepared to work at it; success doesn’t come easily; you can make money, but don’t expect too much; and if you’re in a serious business, take care what you say in your postings. It strikes a good balance between enthusiasm and the need for clear-headed guidance. The advantages for the business user are potentially enormous – because if you’re writing about something you already know well, blogging is fairly easy. It’s free, and you can write new material whenever you feel like it. There’s a tremendous potential for niche markets: if you are an expert in second-hand motor parts, the migration of birds in Europe, or planning application procedures for new motorways – you can be number one in your field without problems.

Even if you are constrained to write about your firm’s business in waste management you have the chance to link up with others in the same field. You can create networks, develop banks of resources, post bulletins, capture the contract opportunities in your area, and make a name for yourself and your firm.

You’ll be doing this even though you are only dealing with issues you would be handling normally – with the difference that you are doing it as part of a social network. And that’s the essence of what this book has to offer: it is showing you how to link up with other people who share your interests.

After blogging come the variety of social media which have mushroomed in the last few years. There are services such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter which started out as networking sites for teenagers but developed very rapidly into large scale communication tools. Each of these seems to have developed its own special audience. MySpace for instance is the premier site for musicians who upload recordings and promotional videos for their performances. Twitter on the other hand has been embraced by media organisations such as the BBC and The Guardian – even though messages posted to the site are limited to 140 characters (like a text message). Similar opportunities exist at uploading sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

They then cover the new generation of online office applications. These are word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and accounting software – such as Google Docs and Zoho.com – which don’t run on your own machine but which you access (free of charge) via the Web. These have the immense advantage that you don’t have to pay for upgrades to the latest version.

There’s also an excellent chapter on podcasts, giving instructions on how to make them and examples of how they might be useful in business. And once again, full details are given of all the free software you might need.

They then go deeper into the details of how companies might use these services internally – using what has come to known as an Enterprise 2.0 approach. Finally, and understandably since the authors all come from a legal background, they outline the law as it relates to the use of social media, covering copyright, trade marks, passing off, and brand names, defamation, privacy, and data protection. A number of complex cases have arisen as a result of bloggers writing about their bosses and the companies they work for. It’s a risky business – so beware!

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Alex Newson et al, Blogging and Other Social Media, London: Gower, 2008, pp.182, ISBN: 0566087898

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Blogging for Dummies

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

set up, publish, and maintain a blog that draws readers

The blog trackers at Technorati now reckon there are 450 million blogs in existence, and new ones are being created at the rate of one per second – that’s 86,400 per day. It’s an unprecedented opportunity for people to broadcast their thoughts and observations – and it’s completely free. So where do you start? Brad Hill’s advice in Blogging for Dummies is aimed at getting you up and running as quickly as possible – though he begins with what blogs are – and what they are not.

He explains the different types of blogs, and how and why they are different from web sites. The good thing is that he looks at all the options and draws up comparison charts which show the features, cost, and options offered by the various providers and software programs. This includes popular features such as the ability to display adverts and upload photos.

First he covers MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 – both of which combine written blogs with lots of picture uploading features. Each step of the process is illustrated with screenshots – so you can follow his instructions and have something online within a few minutes.

Next comes the ubiquitous Blogger (which I use at Mantex) where he points to two disadvantages. One is that you see their templates everywhere, and the other is that Blogger forces you to edit your template code by hand if you wish to personalise your pages.

However, Blogger lets you do so many other things that its benefits outweigh the disadvantages. You can create audio blog entries (podcasting) and send photo postings from your mobile phone (moblogging). Then he does the same thing for TypePad, another popular blog service.

Unlike the other blogging manuals I have read and reviewed he takes on the crucial issue of blogging frequency. If you want a regular readership, you have to maintain regular postings.

Then comes the more complex option of installing blogging software on your own hard disk. This gives you more control, but more technical responsibility and expense. If you go down this route you are basically controlling your own blog from your hard disk, but it’s running from your blog provider’s server. This is an option for the more ambitious or technically gifted, but he gives you plenty of support and talks you through Moveable Type, WordPress, and Radio Userland.

His latter chapters deal with what he calls ‘Total Blog Immersion’ – that is, the techniques you need if you want to take blogging seriously, as many people now do. He explains RSS feeds, which help you to syndicate your blog content; making money from your blog by including adverts; and setting up the two most popular recent spinoffs, audio-blogging and photo-blogging.

So it’s not really just for Dummies at all. He covers the whole issue of blogging – from beginners to quite advanced users. The style is friendly and chatty – though you have to put up with a few lame jokes which are part of the Dummies house style.

But the main efficacy of his approach has already been proved to me. A friend of mine who read the book and followed its advice has recently gone quite quickly from novice to blogger to someone quoted in the national press. Now that’s not bad going.

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Brad Hill, Blogging for Dummies, Indianapolis: IN, Wiley, 2006, pp.367, ISBN: 0471770841

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Blogging genius strategies

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

web log writing techniques and software

Web logging, known as blogging, is an easy way of updating a web page via a browser without the hassle of launching an FTP client or HTML editor. Some people claim that the blog is an entirely new form of communication – and Biz Stone is one of them. Blogging genius strategies is written from the perspective of a breathless young enthusiast, and yet the guidance he offers is perfectly sound and well organised. He starts off by telling you how to establish your blog – which is what most people will want. He shows how to log onto the most popular site of all – Blogger – and establish your Web presence. It’s rather like the world of email and newsgroups ten years ago. (That’s about a hundred years in Internet terms.)

Everyone is posting their diaries, rants and raves, and creating gonzo journals with links to everything that’s hip. He gives an overview of major blog service providers – Blogger, Moveable Type, Diaryland, and Radio Userland. Then, assuming that you are keen to make your blog visually attractive, he throws in a little HTML coding advice. This shows you how to add colour, text manipulation, and layout variety to your pages.

In fact for the more adventurous he even goes as far as Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScripts – then on to the serious business of making money from your blog. How can this be done? Well, via micro-payment systems, affiliate programs such as Amazon’s, and even advertising – though I wouldn’t hold your breath on this last one.

There’s a chapter on arranging archives of your blogs, which can be done on a weekly or monthly basis. Then it’s on to group blogs, blogs which invite comments on themselves, and even corporate blogs.

You can add search engine features, and he also shows you how you can increase traffic to your blog. This goes from making connections at Google to trading links with like-minded bloggers. If that’s not enough, you can even syndicate your blog.

In the latest part of his advice the blog is elaborated and extended until it becomes, logically enough, a Web site. In fact he then goes on to discuss software applications which can download selected blogs you wish to read in the form of daily emails.

Since Biz Stone went on from writing this book to become one of the key players at Twitter – so he knows new media when he sees it. He takes the subject of blogging seriously, and leads you through all the basic elements to get you started, then on to the more advanced techniques which allow you to turn your blog into a modern communication art form. Why not start now – Its all free!

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Biz Stone, Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.309, ISBN: 0735712999

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Blogging, Citizenship, and Media

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

When blogging first took off, the mainstream media (MSM) poo-poohed it, saying it was a fad that wouldn’t last. Next, they started lifting ideas and news from bloggers and quoting them without attribution. Nowadays all newspapers and broadcasters have their own featured blogs and urge their readers to supply copy. They have been turned around within about ten years. So citizen journalism, as Dan Gillmor called it, has arrived and only a fool would pretend otherwise any more.

Mark Tremayne’s collection of academic essays takes this fact as a starting point and looks at the current state of blogging as a cultural phenomenon. What are the facts, as revealed? Well – that the number of blogs continues to rise exponentially, that most have single authors, the majority of whom are adult males, the most popular feature political comment, and that only a small percentage generate comments from their readers.

It’s pointed out that most blogs are in the form of personal diaries, but unlike conventional personal records they are intended to be read by others. And indeed, readers can add their own responses in the form of comments.

Whilst traditional journalism provides individuals with pictures of a world they cannot experience firsthand … blogs operate in the opposite direction, broadcasting the pictures in our heads back to a worldwide audience.

Many of the early chapters are academic studies of blog postings and activity – mainly focused on US political blogs around the period of the 2004 elections and the invasion of Iraq. There’s a lot of technical data related to the way comparisons were made, and the language of discussion is rather abstract and heavily jargonised

Homophily theory underlies Sunstein’s (2000, 2002) work on hate group polarization and cybercascades theories within the Internet’s effect as deleterious to democracy because it enlarges fragmentation, insulation, and enclave deliberation.

It’s largely a sociology of Web use, the motivation of bloggers and blog readers, and the reliability of sources. The latter part of the collection deals with the impact of blogging on traditional journalism. Does the freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment apply to bloggers? And if not, why not?

There’s also an extended consideration of international jurisdiction in libel and defamation cases. Where should a case be brought – in the country where the offending material is downloaded for reading, or where it is stored on servers? The answer to this question seems to vary, depending on the case, the country, and the legislation. The same is true of copyright infringement cases, though the good news is that the costs of prosecuting across national boundaries are so high that individual bloggers are unlikely to be pursued.

The main thrust of the pro-blog argument is supplemented by a report of a citizen journalism project – MyMissourian.com – which set up a community blog in one month using free open source Mambo software. Within a year it had gone from online blog to supporting a print edition.

Mark Tremayne sums up all these issues and looks at the future of both blogging and traditional media. It’s obvious that individual bloggers won’t suddenly replace large-scale news-gathering organisations, but they might have significant impact at a local micro-news level. News organisations might start to invite citizen journalists to create content (as the Guardian is already doing on its in-house blogs ‘Comment is Free’).

There’s also a future for individuals in database journalism in which existing sources are mined for original analyses and comment. And the Wikipedia project proves that the combined efforts of individuals can add up to an overwhelming whole.

What’s certain is that the print and broadcast media are losing their traditional audience and power, the bloggers are gaining in strength and number, and journalism has a new force to be reckoned with.

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Mark Tremayne (ed) Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media, London: Routledge, 2007, pp.287, ISBN: 0415979404

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Essential Blogging

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing for the Web – a popular revolution

Blogs (it’s a contraction of Web Logs) are a form of personal diary kept as Web pages. They can record anything from the trivial details of your own life to online political manifestos. But why would anybody want to read them? Well, some people have transformed the personal diary into an art form, most sprinkle their pages with useful links, others develop what amounts to a one-person daily newspaper, and a few manage to spin out an entirely new form of instant journalism.

It’s so easy, you see. All you need to do is register with a Blogging site, type your thoughts into the templates they provide, and press the Go button. A few seconds later, you’re published on the Web. Of course there’s a little more to it than that – but not much. This book offers a tour of the best blogging sites, how to upload and maintain your pages, and how to configure the options to get the best effects.

A series of chapters, clearly written by enthusiasts, takes you through which Blog sites and software are available – from Blogger, Radio Userland (free software), Moveable Type, and WordPress. Some of these have developed rapidly beyond mere blogging tools into small-scale content management systems.

All this is expanding at a breathtaking rate. Some people even have blogs running alongside serious Web sites. When you come to look at the thousands upon thousands of blogs, you will be amazed at the variety and the skill of the best.

There’s an element of evangelical fervour in all this. Many bloggers seem like techno-Hippies, but the most thoughtful, such as Meg Hourihan, have made claims for blogging as a new form of writing:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of ‘page’), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

And just in case you think this might all be a little trivial, these blogs are real Web pages. So they are tracked by search engines – and if enough people read them, they might therefore become ‘famous’. Many are already joining affiliate programmes and even attracting advertising.

If you want to join in this frenzy of personal expression, build your own soap box, or develop your own one-person newspaper – everything you need by way of instructions is in this one book.

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Cory Doctorow et al, Essential Blogging, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2002, pp.244, ISBN: 0596003889

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How to start blogging

September 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a quick guide to creating an online journal

Start blogging

A blog (short for the term ‘web log’) is a form of online diary or journal. It’s rather like having your own personal web site, but somebody else does all the technical work. All you need do is write the contents.

What do people put in their blogs? Answer: just about anything. Most are a sort of public diary where people record the events of their lives – occasionally adding a rambling commentary on the state of the world in general. Others can be a fairly serious record of professional work, with invitations for visitors to comment.

Belle de Jour claimed to be the diary of a London call girl, and was so successful it has now been snapped up by a publisher and turned into a book. The Baghdad Blogger became famous because he sent eyewitness accounts of what was happening during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Biz Stone’s Blogging: Genius Strategies is an enthusiast’s guidance manual. He hit the blogging scene running, and has made himself an expert overnight. He now works for Blogger, which is owned by Google. Biz takes you from the very first steps of creating a blog, through to the advanced possibilities of syndicating what you write and even making money from it. He’s something of an evangelist, but all his advice is perfectly sound. Good for beginners, but he takes you all the way through to more advanced topics such as content syndication and money-making affiliate programs.

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Content

What else can go into a blog? Links to other blogs you find interesting, pictures of your pet dog, observations left behind by your visitors, even snapshots posted from your mobile phone. Here come some examples. Go to an index such as Blogdex.net which lists the most popular and the most recent blogs. Try A Message from Albia, which is a very funny satire of English social and political life purporting to come from a mythical European country. BoingBoing.net is a very popular ragbag of entries, which when I just checked included an item on the youngest video blogger. Even newspapers such as The Guardian have their own blogs.

It’s a fairly simple process to keep a blog going – once you’ve got it set up. The procedures for signing up and creating a blog are fairly similar in each case. Basically, you subscribe to a blogging service; you set up your blog, choosing from a number of ready-made templates; then you start posting what you have to say.

There’s no point spelling out the procedures in detail here, because online tutorials such as the excellent BlogBasics.com already exist. Read through their suggestions, print out the pages if you wish, then go to Blogger and get started immediately. What I’ll give you here are some general tips, additional support resources, and how to make money from your blog.

Cory Doctorow’s Essential Blogging takes you through all the options of free blogging or paying a small fee to get extra features and more control. It covers all the essentials you might need, and it’s presented in publisher O’Reilly’s impeccably high-standard style. Doctorow is a young guy who has made a big impact in the world of online writing, and he’s now an editor-in-chief at Boing-Boing as well as a successful writer of science fiction. Up to date.

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Procedure

Plan first — Before you start, think of a name for your blog, and decide what you are going to write about. It can follow a theme or a topic; it might be all about your home town or your favourite sports team; it could be a record of your trip around the world. I’ve just discovered that a lot of journalists have personal blogs where they record the gossip they leave out of their official reports. It doesn’t even have to be true: a blog is the perfect medium for an online soap opera.

Sign up — When you have decided on a name and a theme, you need to sign up for an account. These come in two flavours – free and subscription. Blogger.com is the most popular, because it’s free; but some people prefer MoveableType or DiaryLand because they offer additional features for a small charge. WordPress.com offers both a free and a commercial version.

Blog commerce — How can you make an income from all this? Well, it’s unlikely that you can do so directly. But there are all sorts of small possible spin-offs. Lots of bloggers sign up as affiliates at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and other commercial sites. You place advertising for Amazon on your blog, any they send you a (modest) residual income for sending customers through to their site to buy books, CDs, and software.

The most lucrative source of revenue for many blogs and web sites is the Google Adsense scheme. In exchange for letting Google put advertising on your blog or your web pages, they offer you micropayments each time your visitors click through to the advertiser.

Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook is a guide to creating your own blog. It’s a book for anyone who has ever thought about starting but isn’t sure how to post, where to find links, or even where to go to register. She certainly knows what she’s talking about, as you can see at her own blog rebecca’s pocket. She guides you through the whole process of starting and maintaining a blog and answers any questions that might pop up along the way, such as the elements of good blog design and how to find free hosting. She’s gone on to be a very successful professional blogger.

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Advertising

The Google Ads scheme has three big advantages. First, the visitors don’t have to buy anything: you get paid simply for their viewing the ad. Second, the whole thing works automatically. Once the code is in your pages, Google start paying money straight into your bank. Third, Google provide all the scripts and coding, and you can even customise the ads so that they blend into the design of your blog.

One of the cleverest features of Google’s scheme is that the ads are matched to the content of the pages on which they appear. So, if your blog is about music or fashion, the ads will be for CDs and iPod downloads, clothing and online stores. Whatever you write about, the ads will be on the same subject. This is good for Google and good for you, because readers are more likely to click through.

Companies such as Blogger have done everything they can to make the process of setting up a blog as easy as possible. It’s possible to set one up from scratch in just a few minutes. And yet everyone I know – including experienced users – has had some sort of minor problem in doing so. And that includes me.

If you get stuck there are FAQs to answer the most basic queries (“My blog has disappeared. Where has it gone?”). I found these very helpful when setting up my blog because they are full of genuine questions from beginners and answers from more experienced bloggers.

Brad Hill’s advice in Blogging for Dummies is aimed at getting you up and running as quickly as possible – though he begins with what blogs are – and what they are not. He explains the different types of blogs, and how and why they are different from web sites. The good thing is that he looks at all the options and draws up comparison charts which show the features, cost, and options offered by the various providers and software programs. This includes popular features such as the ability to display adverts and upload photos.

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GLOSSARY

Blog (noun) – a journal or diary that is on the Internet – Andrew Sullivan has the most popular blog on the Internet.

Blogger (noun) – a person who keeps a blog – Bloggers are revolutionizing the way news is shared.

Blog (verb) – to write a blog – I am going to blog before breakfast this morning.

Blogging (verb) – the action of writing a blog – Blogging is my way of sharing my passions with the world.

Post (verb) – to write and despatch an individual entry on a blog – I will be posting on this issue tomorrow.

Post (noun) – an individual entry on a blog – In yesterday’s post you mentioned that …

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WordPress 2.7 Complete

December 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Create your own web site from scratch with WordPress

WordPress 2.7 Complete. WordPress started out as blogging software, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it is open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra modules for the basic program. These are plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do.

But like many other OSS programs WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from April Hodge Silver is welcome. She starts out by explaining some basic concepts and parts of WordPress as software. This might appear a little simplistic, but in my experience it’s quite important to grasp some of the fundamentals of a content management system. For instance it’s not immediately apparent that all the parts of what will eventually appear on screen as a unified page are kept separate. That is, the title, sub-title, text, pictures, captions, tags, and meta-data are all stored in different parts of the database – for good reasons. And of course the appearance of this information on screen is controlled separately too – from a style sheet.

She then describes how to make a WordPress installation of your own, and how to set up all the basic configuration of the system. You can get WordPress.com to do all of this for you, by hosting your installation. But they do not give you permission to install the extras with which you can customise your site (and make money from it).

Posting a blog entry is very, very easy, and WordPress also makes it as easy as possible to control and format what you write. But she explains all the options clearly, including the way in which you can add graphics to make your pages more visually interesting.

All of this means getting to know the control panel and its multiple menus, and her explanations are very helpful, because it isn’t always possible to tell what function some item performs simply from its title. What’s the difference between a page and a post for instance? The name alone tells you nothing.

One of the really good things about WordPress is that most of the content of any site is organised using what are called management tables. These are lists of all the basic information known about any item, and because the data is tabulated, it’s much easier to understand and control.

The next part of the book deals with two features which really bring WordPress to life – themes (which is WP jargon for templates) and widgets, which are ‘sidebar accessories’ that allow you to personalise what shows up your sidebars – without having to learn any PHP or HTML code.

In fact the urge to have an individualised site is so universal that she wisely includes instructions for designing your own theme. It’s at this point you’ll need HTML design skills and a knowledge of cascading style sheets (CSS) – but she provides some basic coding to get you started.

And for those readers with a creative bent who have coding skills she also demonstrates how to create your own plugins and widgets. (A widget is just a plugin with extra functions.) But you’ll also have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and dive into the database at this point.

There’s an interesting chapter on using WordPress as a content management system. This explains in some detail the difference between static pages and normal posts, and it presents a different type of theme which is geared to the construction of a commercial site with product pages. Although they are not covered here, there are now excellent plugins offering fully-featured eCommerce systems.

WordPress is now up to version 2.9 – but I checked all the basic concepts outlined in this book, and they still hold good. Even the copious screen shots illustrating the guidance show exactly what you’ll see when you start using the latest version. This is an excellent guidance manual which I could have done with a year ago when I first started learning how to use WordPress. It would have saved me lots of time and speeded up the process enormously.

April Hodge Silver, WordPress 2.7 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2009, pp.277, ISBN 184719656X

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WordPress for Business Bloggers

January 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

promote your WordPress blog with advanced plugins, analytics, advertising, and SEO

WordPress for Business Bloggers When blogging first took off in the mid 1990s the mainstream media viewed bloggers with lofty contempt. I can remember both the BBC and the Guardian making sneering ‘get a life’ comments about bloggers daring to report their own version of news. They all said it was a self-indulgent short-term gimmick. Now, there isn’t a newspaper or broadcast organisation which doesn’t boast its own bloggers and doesn’t welcome the contribution of user-generated content.

At the same time, some individual blogs have become phenomenally successful. Arianne Huffington’s The Huffington Post became an instant hit as an Internet newspaper, and one-man-band UK political blogger Paul Staines proudly displays his end-of-month site visitor statistics which outstrip those of national newspapers. This sort of popularity has attracted advertising revenue, and there are now individuals whose blogs are now a full time business.

WordPress is one blogging platform which has kept pace with this development by making it easy for non-programmers to add all sorts of interactive functions via plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do. But like many other open source software programs, WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from Paul Thewlis is welcome.

It’s aimed specifically at people who want to use a blog for business purposes – which means coming to grips with eCommerce, advertising, and site promotion via search engine optimization (SEO). The first part of his guide offers an upbeat account of the business possibilities for business bloggers – increased sales, contact with clients, news updates, company promotion, and so on. He makes the good point that there are now any number of different models for a successful business blog. And WordPress has all the tools you will require, from analysing your performance, promoting your blog, and managing your content, to monetizing your site with advertising revenue and affiliate programmes.

Next comes the making of a strategic blog plan, which means setting out your business objectives. The first part of this will probably be easy: you will want more visitors, more business, and more sales. But the next crucially important part is that he shows you a corresponding list of the WordPress features or plugins you will need to implement these goals.

This is followed by the technical requirements for installing WordPress on your own server, and even learning the rudiments of HTML and style sheets (CSS) in order to design your own theme. This strikes me as rather over-ambitious for beginners, who will probably be much better served by using ready-made templates (called ‘themes’ in WP jargon).

In fact he even goes further and has his aspiring eCommerce merchant editing the style sheet coding to produce an original three-column page design. I must say that it’s difficult to imagine any would-be business person who would be capable of or prepared to do this. There’s nothing wrong with someone learning a bit of coding, but a much more realistic strategy would have been to use templates.

There’s a chapter on uploading graphics which usefully explains the difference between a library and a gallery. This is another instance where the naming of functions is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. He uses the NextGEN Gallery plugin for this and video display – another example of the free add-ons which make life easier for the non-programming user.

After this fairly technical interlude, he then switches to the actual content of your site or blog – which is likely to be text. Writing for online consumption is much more skilled than most people realise, and he’s right to emphasise the need for brevity, structure, and engagement.

Yet this soft skills section too requires an explanation of a technical nicety – the difference between categories and tags, both of which are used to give taxonomy to your content. He uses the comparisons of categories being like a navigation system and tags being like index entries, which is reasonable enough.

Next he covers the arcane science of search engine optimization (SEO). Fortunately, WordPress has been designed with this in mind, but even so there’s room for a couple more plugins to make the job easier.

I’m a little bit circumspect about the social networking side of business promotion where proper, commercial sites are concerned. Sure, I can see people Twittering and Facebooking if your site is closely allied to the sort of hot, gossipy interaction that goes on in political and newspaper blogs – but I can’t see it happening if you’re selling pharmaceuticals or heavy machine engineering equipment.

He also assumes that his target business blogger is going to be engaged with all the trappings of site-linking, comments moderation, pings, and trackbacks which is another doubtful supposition – but it’s useful that he explains how to do it all, as well as how to set up a contact form using another popular plugin – cforms II.

There’s a chapter on using analytic tools to assess the performance of your blog, and another showing you how to monetize it by linking in to affiliate programs such as Google AdSense and Amazon

Almost everyone starting off a business site is likely to do so with a WordPress installation using a cheap shared hosting account. But if the business is successful, you will need to move your installation onto dedicated servers. This is a useful and intelligent inclusion in a book of this type.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Paul Thewlis, WordPress for Business Bloggers, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2008, pp.337, ISBN 1847195326

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