This is the age of blogging. Everyone can do it because it requires so little technical knowledge, but it is also a great opportunity to learn the basics of web design with HTML and CSS. There are sites like Blogspot.com that allow you to just create an account and start blogging.  All of the software is already in place so that you just pick your theme and then use a WYSIWYG (which stands for What You See Is What You Get) editor to create your posts.  The alternative, which gives you greater power but requires more technical know-how, is WordPress.  Click to read more…

WordPress is an amazing package of software.  It’s open source (yet another amazing example of volunteer coding in action), well designed, well supported, and really easy to use.  This very blog is built on WordPress.  What I like most about the package is the flexibility in which themes and plugins can be incorporated.  You just download them and unzip them into the Themes or Plugins directory and they show up in the WordPress control panel for activation.  It doesn’t get any easier than that.

Because WordPress is written in PHP, all of the code that works behind the scenes can be viewed and editted by web developers like me.  This allows me to see how the package works and make edits to the functionality if I need to.  Again, this is bonus knowledge that not everyone has, but anyone that knows PHP should be able to make simple edits to the code if they need to, and that helps add to the flexibility of WordPress.  If you are interested in creating a blog yourself, I recommend you do so because it allows you to capture your ideas over a period of time.  At the same point, you might build an audience and you’ll learn some web design basics.  Happy Blogging!