How to Start a Blog

There are many FREE websites that offer the ability to start a basic blog, be it for personal use to let friends and family know what you’re up to, or for professional use, to help get your company coverage online.

Here are a few websites that are very easy to use, and require no knowledge of programming or coding…

MULTIPLY.COM-Multiply makes it easy to create, share and discuss your blog, photos, and videos with more of the people you know, and fewer of the people you don’t.

VOX.COM. Done by TypePad, but free. Has three levels of privacy – public, friends, and family. Take the tours of all the new ones and see which one you like.

BLOGGER – A blog is your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more. All for FREE.

WORDPRESS (the gold standard). And all of these are template driven so all you need to concentrate on is content.

WINDOWS LIVE SPACES – Microsoft’s blogging and Social Networking platform. The site was originally released in early 2004 under the MSN Spaces name to compete with other social networking sites. Windows Live Spaces received an estimated 27 million (27,000,000) unique visitors per month as of August 2007.

Uploading a webpage to a website

Links are getting broken when she moves the site from one her home computer to her website host. The problem is that links are relative to a page. Meaning, the images are currently pointing to the source images on the home computer. They need to be pointing to duplicate copies of the images that should be hosted on her website provider’s web space. Once that’s done, re-upload the pages, and when you load the page in a web browser, the images should work.

Designing Your First Web Site

You can use Macromedia’s DreamWeaver– but it’s expensive. You might want to look at Contribute, which is also from Macromedia. It’s under $100 and very easy to use. Both are WYSIWYG editors – they create the HTML behind the scenes for you for the most part.

An open source option worth a look is nVu.

You can use one of the free Blogging services like Blogger, Live Journal, or MSN Spaces. You can also use the WYSIWYG Web Builder, it’s completely free and works great.