Blogging with Wordpress

Those of you who read my Marketing Karma newsletter may remember that back in January I mentioned that one of my resolutions was to try blogging with Wordpress, but on a self-hosted site rather than the free hosted version. Well, I've set up my Wordpress site and thought that this blog would be a good place to document my progress.

This is what I've done so far and I'll be expanding on some of the points in other posts:
1. Bought the domain name I wanted for the blog - www.toutefrance.co.uk
2. Bought 'Wordpress for Dummies' by Lisa Sabin Wilson, which I've added to the books page on Marketing Karma. This book has been a great help as it's meant I can sit down away from the computer and read up about Wordpress and what I need to do. Everything is laid out in a step by step way, but although it says you don't need to have technical knowledge, it certainly helps to have some for the self-hosted Wordpress sites.
3. Choose a hosting company - this was more difficult as there are so many web hosting companies and in the end I went with the existing web hosting company I use for Forty First and Marketing Karma. I emailed them asking all sorts of questions that Wordpress suggested but on retrospect, things may have been easier if I'd chosen a web hosting company who specialise in Wordpress sites.
4. Choose a Wordpress template. I thought this would be easy, but it was really hard! I've decided to go with a free template for now and when things get going properly I'll get a professionally designed template. Wordpress.org has loads of free templates but not all of them worked or had the features I wanted, and not knowing exactly what I wanted in the beginning made the task of finding a decent template much more difficult.
5. Download the Wordpress files. As I went with a web hosting company that didn't have a 'one click' Wordpress set up, it meant downloading all the Wordpress files from Wordpress and uploading them to my web hosting account. I also had to set up a MySQL database which I've never done before and if I'd chosen a different host, this could have all been done for me!

I'll continue with my experiences with Wordpress in another post along with the techie bits, but it's been quite a learning curve so far. The above doesn't even include starting to write posts, so you can see how long it can take to set up and manage!