The solutions your “friendly” web developer will suggest will often be their excellent in house content management system (or CMS). Having been exposed to some of these in my time, exactly NONE of them have been particularly useful for all the things suggested in the first paragraph!

If your developer suggests their CMS, politely decline!

The only one I have come across that is any good is WordPress. Having already discussed wordpress in previous posts you’ll get the idea that I do like this software.

I like it a lot!

Not only do we get some cool wordpress themes, some top class wordpress plugins, but also the best CMS you’ll ever find.

The wordpress CMS has gone through many iterations and is now considered a “mature” software, meaning it is relatively bug free, extremely user friendly and has a really easy learning curve.

The fact that there are literally thousands of add ons and themes for this software tells you it is really well liked by the “geeks” of the world too and is certainly here to stay for at least the next few years, which is more than you can say for the CMS from your developer!

I’ve set up quite a few BLOGs now for my own business and other peoples businesses, and the CMS back end is easily adopted by my clients, which makes my life really simple too!

One other thing with WordPress, it is not restricted to just BLOGs, you can set up actual websites with it too! Whilst a little cumbersome for a simple website, more complex sites can happily thrive on a WordPress back end, making updating and managing you web site an absolute doddle!

So the next time you are wanting to get a BLOG or a website built, consider using WordPress, or asking your developer to build it using wordpress, so that you have much more control over the management of the site.

Now before you go crazy and start creating dozens of little BLOGs for each part of your personal training business, using WordPress or Blogger’s free tool there are a few things you should consider.

Whilst the “free” tool on wordpress.com and blogger.com is excellent there are some limitations with it.

1. You have a limitation with the themes you can use, most of the standard wordpress ones look awful.
2. On a standard wordpress BLOG I am yet to find a way of inserting the code required to put an opt-in form, to allow you to collect names and email addresses.
3. There are a number of really important “plugins” (clever add-ons for WordPress) that cannot be used on the “free” site. The plugins I am talking about are ones that will accelerate your search engine rankings and optimise your site better.
4. The standard domain name you use with the free site is not very pretty or easy to remember. For example TimIsAFatLossGod.wordpress.com compared to TimIsAFatLossGod.com (although it is possible to set up with a redirect it is not particularly search engine friendly.)

These issues may not seem like a long list of problems BUT they are significant enough if you want massive success with your BLOG.

The solution is relatively simply, but as always not necessarily easy if you are a bit wary of the tech stuff. It is likely you will need a geek to help you out on this, but it is possible to do yourself. You’ll need the following…

• A domain name, buy it from GoDaddy.com
• A web site host with the ability to install wordpress on it. HostGator does have this, as do I on my own server.
• … erm that’s it! For the moment.

You may want to find a theme to use on the site as well, there are plenty of free themes out there as well as ones you can purchase. I can recommend TemplateMonster.com for some fantastic paid for themes…

The steps are not complicated and if you are completely over-awed by the task then just hire a developer from Elance.com to help you out.

Step.1 If you don’t have access to your webservers cPanel, then ask your web host how to do that. If you have a standard cPanel, then you should be able to install various software include WordPress on to your website.

Step.2 Login to cPanel and then scroll to the bottom of the list of icons to a section that says software. Select the icon saying “Fantastico”, it normally has a wizards hat icon. The screen will then show a list of different software to install. You want to click the one for WordPress.

Step.3 A box will appear on the right hand side with details to install. Click on the link saying “new installation”. It is a good idea to install in a new directory, so in the 2nd box type in “blog”. You’ll also need to specify an admin login and password. The rest of the information you don’t need to complete at this time. Click “Install WordPress”, On the next page click “Finish Installation”, and the installation will take a few moments to complete

Step.4 Once the installation is complete the screen will tell you the location of the login screen, which you will need to bookmark. It will look like http://www.YourDomain.com/blog/wp-admin

Step.5 Open the login page and enter the user id and password you entered in step 3. and you’ll then enter the Dashboard screen for WordPress, most of the stuff here is prett self explanatory. It is more complicated than Blogger but certainly a more advanced tool for blogging.

Step.6 Go to http://wphacks.com/free-premium-wordpress-themes/ and find a theme you like… and click to download it to your Computer.

Step.7 Using an FTP program upload the theme to the location of your blog where the themes are stored… this is normally public_html/blog/wp-content/themes you’ll need to UNZIP the theme first then upload the folder in entirety to this themes folder.

Step.8 Go back to the dashboard of the BLOG, select the “Design” menu option, you’ll then see your theme in the selection. Click to select it, and it will show a preview of it, select the link at the top right of the preview to install the theme.

Done.

It is easy if you have the access for the cPanel and the FTP accounts, both of these can be obtained from your web host. If you can’t get yourself a new web host.

Tim

PS. Gonna do the same for my regular Fitness BLOG later this week, so will do a screen capture video to do a full demo of how easy it is.