A lot of people don’t start a blog because they see it as something ‘techie’. The other day I spoke to an up and coming young chef who was cooking fabulous food. She had taken wonderful pictures of her culinary creations and she was doing the right thing by posting them onto her Facebook page. This proved she was used to social media and understood the need to publicise her wares.
I told her that because she was happily posting onto Facebook, this didn’t mean she couldn’t do the same in a blog. But the very word ‘blog’ immediately put her defence shields up; it was technical, it commanded website knowledge, it was totally the unknown… and that was the crux of the problem, she didn’t know or understand anything about blogs.
Further questioning quickly established it hadn’t taken her long to get to know Facebook so that she felt easy about popping in to upload a picture or make a comment about her latest supper party she had hosted or tell her friends about the scrumptious wedding cake she had just delivered to the bride’s family.
So I explained to her this is exactly the same with a blog. They are just as user-friendly as the other social networking sites, especially WordPress, which has been refined and simplified over the years to make it as easy as writing in Word. The majority of us use Word almost every day, it is a commonly used platform we all understand, so it stands to reason a content management system like a blog should be made just as easy to use.
I write a nature post every day as part of my blogathon. I go in, write the post and then I’m out again within 15 minutes (these posts are never very long). WordPress has made it as easy as possible to write, edit, upload and compose posts by eliminating all the difficult technical stuff, by creating intuitive methods of achieving what you need to do, placing the methods and buttons required in easy to find places, and taking all the hassle away.
All the hard work has been done behind the scenes so you don’t have to worry about the technical stuff. All you need to do is to click on the appropriate button and everything is done for you! No technicalities required whatsoever! Couldn’t be easier!
I specialise in teaching non-technical people how to create a blog and regularly post in it. I understand that some people are confused by the jargon, bemused by the editing fields, scared to press a button in case it blows the computer up, frightened to go into the ‘unknown’ in this weird and wonderful blog.
But once they have a friendly, helpful, empathetic person by their side helping them with each function and explaining each transaction, they soon pick it up and are blogging away like anything. Quite a few start to predict what comes next and it is me that has to run to keep up with them! That’s brilliant, because I have given them the confidence to try things out for themselves, and that’s what my blogging teaching is all about!
WordPress is both easy and difficult
Fairy Blog Mother
Whether you find using WordPress easy or difficult, it does depend what you’re using it for and what kind you have.
I have mentioned before that WordPress have made blogging as easy as possible, and certainly the CMS (content management system) has been programmed for effortless use. The areas that you regularly use, for example, to write a post or create a new page, are designed for efficiency and straightforwardness, especially once you’ve start using it regularly, and if you are familiar with Word, you can easily adapt to WordPress.
WordPress.com is particularly focused on providing a free-hosted blog with the minimum of fuss. All you need to do is sign up, confirm your username, choose your template and start blogging. Everything is pre-programmed so you don’t need to worry about anything technical, and you can create a really good blog within a surprisingly short time-period.
WordPress.org is where the fun really starts. Here you have been given full access to the world of blogging, and you can add or subtract as much as you like from your blog. Not only is HTML accepted and works properly, which is necessary for advertising, installing sign-up forms or pasting up other promotional gadgetry, you have the opportunity to adapt your themes to suit your ideas, corporate image or preferences.
If you have the know-how, here you can pop into your CSS to change the colours of your design and links, create new banners and place images into your sidebars to promote your business, books or whatever, choose from thousands of plugins to improve the performance of your blog – in fact the more you learn about blogging, the more you can add stuff to your blog to make it do something amazing!
And if you find all of this too difficult, hire someone that knows this technical stuff, because once they’ve finished your blog will be fantastic! And as the process of writing posts and creating pages is the same as WordPress.com, it is as easy as falling off a log to post regularly, keep your readers happy, interact with them daily, encourage comments and feedback and persuade more subscribers to join your RSS feed so they can keep up-to-date with everything that you do!