Help Setting Up Blog

[AxelAnnie]

Can anyone recommend a good a good blog interface?

I am working on a website for my barn. The assistant trainer would like to incorporate a blog feature that she can update with horse show results, congrats to people who buy a new horse, and stuff like that.

I came into this in the middle, and am just helping out of the goodness of my sweet little heart. The site is in html (which I would never have chosen had I been the one to start on it). We would like to be able to have the blog formatted to match the rest of the site.

I told the people at my office that I would ask the people on my Figure Skating site.........cause I was sure they would know!

Thanks in advance.

[overedge]

I run a blog on Wordpress, and it is fairly easy to understand and use even for a techno dweeb like me. You don't even have to know HTML to set it up and to post on it. It's also free - you can pay for some of the fancier themes/formats that have more options, but even those seem to be quite reasonably priced.

Could you run the trainer's blog on Wordpress and link to it from your site?

[backspin]

I use blogger, also very simple, gives you some decent template choices, and also lets you go in & add your own html if you wish. Example here: http://debmarett.blogspot.com/

[Japanfan]

I'm thinking of switching to Wordpress because the current template I use for my website - which is actually a blog site, typepad - doesn't show up on searches. If I search for my company, I don't get a hit, whereas if I search for one that has a Wordpress website, I get a hit.

Does wordpress have a variety of colour options, in terms of background and text? Most of the Wordpress websites/blogs I've seen are kind of plain in terms of the colour scheme. I don't know if this is because of the options or the users' choices.

[Angelskates]

Japanfan, all Wordpress blogs can be customised. Sometimes the free customisations are limited, or the ones with the templates are limited, but you can buy them or add them with HTML. You can add widgets to do a lot of things that don't come with templates as well. My work and personal are both Wordpress, but have been customised. My work one quite significantly, by a professional, and my personal one, not very much (I added widgets basically, and had someone help with some other things).

[joeperryfan]

I'm thinking of switching to Wordpress because the current template I use for my website - which is actually a blog site, typepad - doesn't show up on searches. If I search for my company, I don't get a hit, whereas if I search for one that has a Wordpress website, I get a hit.

Does wordpress have a variety of colour options, in terms of background and text? Most of the Wordpress websites/blogs I've seen are kind of plain in terms of the colour scheme. I don't know if this is because of the options or the users' choices.

That shouldn't have anything to do with the CMS used, that should be related to other items such as metadata, site title and description, number of links to your site on other sites and others I can't remember right now, but if Wordpress has some sort of edge it's only because it probably makes its users setup the metadata correctly. Go Fug Yourself was on typepad for a long time if I'm not mistaken.

[AxelAnnie]

I run a small internet company in the legal field. We are releasing an update to both our interface and underlying software. The front end is all in Wordpress.......which is straight forward. If we do the blog (for my barn) in word press, where does it run from? So, my company servers are hosted by Xerox. The barn website has a link to a YouTube Channel (for sales horses)....and that stuff lives at YouTube. I will do some more checking around in Wordpress.............well, that is a lie. The gal here who is working on all this stuff will do the looking around LOL.

[AxelAnnie]

Thanks so much for your comments and suggestions. Really appreciate it all.

[joeperryfan]

Your site can be hosted by wordpress themselves or you can download it and install in another server of your choice, if you are not familiar with any of this perhaps you should go with the hosted version of wordpress, they offer several customization options. Check http://www.wordpress.com for hosting.

[sk8pics]

Google also has a simple blog you can set up. I played around with it a little to advise a friend. I kind of liked it. He had made a mess of the Wordpress account he tried to set up, so I am hoping he will either forget about it or go with google.

[Angelskates]

I run a small internet company in the legal field. We are releasing an update to both our interface and underlying software. The front end is all in Wordpress.......which is straight forward. If we do the blog (for my barn) in word press, where does it run from? So, my company servers are hosted by Xerox. The barn website has a link to a YouTube Channel (for sales horses)....and that stuff lives at YouTube. I will do some more checking around in Wordpress.............well, that is a lie. The gal here who is working on all this stuff will do the looking around LOL.

You can choose. Both of my Wordpress sites run on shared servers hosted in Hong Kong, for example, because I don't want a .wordpress address, and because China blocks Wordpress, so this way my sites can be accessed without a VPN. Shared servers are much cheaper than individual servers, and are all a small website needs. Wordpress hosting is free, though I tend to think it looks a little unprofessional for a business. Wordpress, like most sites, can link and embed video from YouTube, or other places.

[star_gazer11]

Another vote for Wordpress, either the free (wordpress.com) or self-hosted which you pay for your web hosting (software download at wordpress.org). Blogger is an option if you really want to tweak the html for free (this is a paid option, custom css, on the free wordpress.com service). Free wordpress.com themes, over 150, are here, click on free. Some themes are a paid upgrade, those are listed under premium.

If you want full control of html/css, you'll need to do the self-hosted option using the free wordpress.org software. Just be aware that they actually update/upgrade the software pretty frequently - factor that into site maintenance. You don't necessarily have to super-up-to-date all the time, but you don't want to be still using WP 2.x.x when it's currently at 3.5.x. If you use the free service, they take care of that for you.

The free service now offers a paid upgrade for custom domains - so I think you could have a combination of yoursitedomain.com/blog but have it hosted on the free service so you don't worry about the software upgrades.

[AxelAnnie]

Y'all are such a fabulous resource. We have set up a test site on Blogger. The trainers who will be posting to this section are not so tech savvy....and "don't make me do something on the computer" level. The Google option seemed easiest to access and to use. We shall see.