A blog is a website where you can easily post news and other anouncements for the benefit of your congregration and other interested parties. Although a blog usually is limited in functionality compared to a custom build website, the easy of use makes up for that.
Blog here, Blog there…
There are some nice free blogs available to our benefit. I will not mention all of them, only the ones i have personally worked with before:
They both have their pro’s and cons and i will not go into that here. You can find that out for yourself here.
Get the Website Quick…
For both blog systems you need to register at their sites. For Blogger you will need to have a gmail account. If you dont have that, then this account will be opened for you when you register. Your website address will be for example mytemple.blogspot.com.
When you register at wordpress.com you can immediately start a blog. This is offered as part of the registration process. The username that you will choose will also be the website address, for example mytemple.wordpress.com.
What will your blog look like ?
With both Blogger and wordpress you can choose from a variety of pre-made layouts (templates). This you can do in the Adminstrative panel (called Dashboard). Blogger supplies a few templates that might suit your needs. WordPress has more templates avaiable but if you want to change colors you need to buy credits to do that. With Blogger you can do this for free.
This blog/website uses the “Digg 3 Column” template and i created my own banner on top. I created this in almost 20 minutes.
Still Not Easy Enough?
You will need some time and knowlegde to get acquainted to both Blog systems. That is unavoidable. But these systems are, by far, the most easy to use and to set up without having to know all the technical details.
This article is not a complete guide on how to set up your blog and does not claim to be one. If you are a complete beginner i suggest to start with Bloggger. If that proves too difficult, then you might consider asking a computer friend to get things going.
When the blog website is created, the posting of articles is even easier. With Blogger you can send an email to your blog that will be published automagically!!.
Some examples
- This site of course (build on wordpress)
- amsterdam.harekrishna.nl (Blogspot blog redirected to our own domain)
[...] about Starting a Website ??? Posted on 27 May 2008 by uddhava I already showed you the easy ways to start blogging. Now i give you some guidelines to start your own website. Mind [...]