Where do I begin. That was really the question.
So after doing a little research, my first step was to write a simple, (for lack of better words), mission statement. What I came up with is on the About page. So why WordPress and why a blog. As I understand it, WordPress is one of the leading web content management systems available and there are many websites developed using it. I have never really been a web developer, but it is currently used where I work. I figured I may also have some resources available to help with learning about it. I’m choosing to do a blog because over the years, I have come to rely upon blogs
for getting technical assistance for work related items.
The next step that I took, was to look for where or how I would host this blog website that I wanted to create. I selected the first one to come up in a Google search… Bluehost. One of the first questions that are asked when setting up a website is what do you want to call this thing. So I side-stepped this step to do some soul searching and started
looking up possible domain names.
I looked back at my “mission statement” and used that as a basis for my domain name search and came up with “TrailsXC”. Why TrailsXC? I chose this name because the besides the niche tech stuff that I do at work, all of my activities outside work related to biking, running, and hiking. My other activities include camping, golfing, and working on genealogy.
After I came up with the website name, I stepped back into the Bluehost website setup. I completed the registration and then started to choose a template from the hundreds of website templates and published the website based on the generic samples and examples which are actually published on the site right now.
When I started my research, I downloaded a few books on WordPress and Blogging on my Amazon kindle, so that is my next step. To read and learn as much as I can about this system. Here are the books that I am starting with…
“How to Create a Website Using WordPress”, by Brian Patrick
“How to Make Money Blogging”, by Bob Lotich
“WordPress, Made Super Simple”, by Jack Davies and Sarah Wiley
So I must admit, at this point I have not yet to read them. I probably should have actually read them before I started down this path, but when I am doing something for myself, I have to just dive in or I won’t start a new project. I think I get analysis paralysis and try to overthink it. So now I am in.
As I go to post my first blog-post, I see that the system does something similar to that is done in the programming world; that is to set up a “Hello World” page or program. That is generally the first program that you create when learning a programming language. So I think I’ll just leave it and consider it as Post #0000.