Why I like WordPress Blogging

WordPress Blogging is now my preferred way to develop websites. Some of the reasons are the following:

you can set up WordPress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories each time you make a post. It is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get traffic and useful backlinks to your blog almost automatically. A regular site requires a lot of work to get the search engines to index it, get back links to improve your ranking, and then start getting traffic. A blog like WordPress can do all that “grunge” work for you automatically.

WordPress has a very powerful and flexible architecture that allows you to easily customize the appearance by using themes and widgets and improve the basic functionality by using plugins. WordPress blogging is very user-friendly WordPress allows the use of Categories and they are a powerful way to improve the structure of your site both for human visitors and for the search engines. Categories simplify the searches of your users because they allow them to find posts about a specific subject. Categories can also be very useful for Search Engines especially if they are search keywords.

You could sign on to WordPress.com and create a blog in their hosted platform. This solution would allow you to just use the software and resources provided by WordPress.com and not to worry about issues such as a domain name and a hosting platform

You could instead prefer a Self-Hosted solution with your own domain and hosting and have full control of your blog. The first solution is simpler and probably a good way for a beginner to start and gain some experience, but does not allow the full functionality provided vy the second solution.

The installation of a self hosted solution is more complex and requires you to create a MySQL database, to install WordPress on your server, to create a wp-config.php file and other activities where you could make some errors. However most hosting companies offer the cpanel, a Linux based web hosting control panel that provides a graphical interface tool which allows, among other things, to use the Fantastico script library that allows to make a very simple installation of WordPress.

Once you have installed WordPress, you can login by using your administrator user and manage your blog from the WordPress Dashboard.

WordPress Blogging Main Setting Up Activities

When you use the WordPress Dashboard, you will find many submenus that asslow you to perform important setting up and administration activities.

Some important ones are the following:

Selection and activation of a theme. WordPress provides a default theme, but there are many other good ones. You can choose one that you like and is suitable to your chosen niche. Once you select a new theme, you will find that the appearance of your blog changes significantly.

Addition of plugins: They are special files that make it easy to add extra functions and features to your self-hosted WordPress blog. They are usually written in PHP and can be downloaded from the WordPress site or from the site of the authors. Some important plugins are those that add SEO functions that will allow you to simplify the SEO activities requires to have your site indexed by Search Engines and to receive good page ranks.

Addition of sidebar Widgets: You could add them to display Adsense advertisements or to promote some product or to display links of related sites and much more.

Adding Posts to Your WordPress Blog: One of the menus in the Dashboard page allow you to add new posts and manage previously entered posts.

You can enter your post in HTML mode or in a Words like editor and you can easily switch between the two modes.

Conclusions

This article is only an introduction to WordPress blogging and we will better investigate some detail subjects in other posts.