After over a year of blogging, I’m still not what one would call a seasoned blogger. If you notice, it’s been a while since I’ve last updated MKL. I have put off posting quite a list of articles because I couldn’t find the time to actually sit down and write with me in the last stages of my pregnancy (then the eventual child delivery) and the many assignments I still had to finish at the office before the D-day.
But still, I’d like to think that I do know enough about building a website and/or a blog seeing as I do have one and I also maintain a website at work. So here’s my simple guide to website-building and hopefully you, dear readers, would find helpful. Or more accurately, here’s the blow-by-blow of how I built MKL from a concept to a reality.
The MKL Experience
I was very hesitant to build my own blog. First, I didn’t know what exactly it is that I want to blog about and even if I do get to decide on a topic, I don’t have the focus to actually stick with it. Nor was I confident that I would be able to come up with interesting stories/posts that people would actually read and react to. But all that’s behind me now; these days, my only blogging concern is how to blog more regularly.
I have a programming degree but, sadly, website programming is not my forte (I’m more of the database programmer). Part of my initial hesitation to blogging was the prospect of building a website from scratch. Fortunately, there are blogging tools or content management systems that are freely available that allow bloggers to build their blogs without needing to worry about the technical details. In fact, MKL is running on WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platform on the web. For the LGU website that I maintain, I chose to use Joomla.
Once you have chosen the tool that would serve your blogging needs, you need to decide on a theme or the overall appearance of your blog. I have not been blessed with creative genes so visual appeal was one of the things that I thought of a lot prior to building this website. I’ve been told the content is more important than how my blog actually looks like but I still could not shake off the thought that I need to impress people at the get-go. If people think my blog looks shabby and disorganized, how the heck would I be able to get their attention, right?
Thankfully, there are thousands of themes that you can choose from. Some of these themes are downloadable for free but there are others that are only available on purchase. Another option available to you is hiring a graphic designer who will create or customize a theme unique to your blog. They can be quite costly, though.
Once, you have the blogging tool and theme in place, you can then start populating your blog with posts that are interesting and unique. This is very important because as a blogger, you need to build a faithful readership that will come back for more, interact with you and respect you for the originality of your posts.
For a more in-depth discussion on how to build a website/blog, you might want to check out http://www.hereshowtomakeawebsite.com/. They offer a step-by-step tutorial on how to make a website that is as pleasing to the mind as it is to the eyes.
