It seems like people are always asking me to help them setup websites, and most commonly people want – at least in part – a blog to present themselves to the world. As a developer this is great for me, as a solution like WordPress gives them a great looking site they can maintain without needing to come back to me.
But there are still a lot of technical functions under the hood that are hard to discover for people who have better things to do with their time them explore their blog options, and who might be worried about breaking things. Plus there is a whole world of social media beyond just setting up your blog and hoping people find it that can be hard to break into at first.
So rather then deal with people one to one, as I already have a couple of people involved in the conversation I am opening up my Blog School as a way to present the information about starting a blog I am putting together, and allowing people who join in late to pick up on past classes. Of course, much if not all of this information is already available on the Internet and I’ll reference that as much as makes sense, and while it will be presented as an on-line course I will give personal assistance to people as they go along as much as possible.
The course will start out with the basics, offering advice on the initial set-up and hosting options, registering a domain if required and picking a theme, leading on to how to post a blog entry and get it seen by others, promoting your blog, a look at other social media sites like Twitter and common terms people use, getting stats from your blog so you can see who is visiting, and exploring common plug-ins so you can extend the features of your new blog.
I’ll also cover some more advanced topics over time like editing themes and creating new opens.
Some of the topics might seem very technical at first, and you won’t need to follow all of them, so I’ll keep a clear separation between the different levels, and I will be on hand if people need additional help.
Classes will be posted every 2 to 4 days at first with the first on Saturday 13th June 2009.
