Creating a blog

Erica Johns and Charlie Wheeler-Osman
Sep 6, 2017
5 min read

Creating a blog

Creating a blog is really easy and what is even better, today there are many sites that deal with all the coding and complicated parts for you leaving you to just create and design your website yourself. First and foremost when you decide to create a blog, you need to decide a few things:

Decide what your blog will focus on

What do you want you blog to be about? Fashion? Travel? Food?

Decide which of the blogging platforms you’ll use (for example Wix)

This will be the website you use in order to create your own website, they do all the nitty gritty complicated parts that you may not understand, making the process a lot quicker and simpler for you.

Decide which web host to use

The web host is the website you will choose to purchase your domain with, the domain being the name given to your website (for example ours is www.tipsy-travellers.com)

Once you have decide on all of the above you can get yourself started and begin to create your website. We chose to use Wix, we not only found them the simplest, but they give you the most support when it comes to the designing. They provide you with a large number of basic templates that you can use as a starting point for your website base, they also give you hints and tips along the way that will help you to improve your website and make it more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, which will therefore in the long run direct more traffic to your site.

So here is a step by step guide on the very quick and easy method to create your blog with Wix!

Step 1: Pick a Template or Add a Blog To Your Website

As I mentioned Wix have a larger number of templates that you can use to build the basis of your website, you can delete anything within any of these templates that you aren't happy with along the way and move anything around. Just use the templates as a background to help you have a starting point to work with. You can search from a number of different categories to help you find the person outline for your website.

When you pick your template, it will replicate everything you see on the template, so you will have to replace any images/text to suit your own page. If you wish to edit the page names, delete pages or add any new pages in you can do this here:

Step 2: Organize the Layout

You can move anything around on your site, you can enlarge or shrink anything on the page, you can move it around anywhere you wish to. Clicking on the side panel of your editor on the left hand-side will give you even more tools to add to your site. If you wish to undo or redo any of your moves you can do so at the top right hand-side of the page. To save/preview or publish your site click on the top right hand-side also, note that once you publish your site you cannot undo this action, you will have to create a new site, and duplicate the site and then remove the published one altogether. So please only hit publish when you are 100% happy with it!

You can change anything on the site, from fonts to colours to adding buttons and pop ups, you can add adverts to your site through setting up with affiliate programmes that you can do through a number of different sites, read our blog on Affiliates here to find out more about this.

Step 3: Choose a Name

Choosing your name is really important to do so before you publish, using a name "just for now" isn't the best way to go, because you will begin to build a following on the one name then to choose it people will then be typing in the wrong name on Google/Facebook to find you. So you must take extra care when choosing the name of your website and if you plan on purchasing a domain to make your website name look more professional then take this part very seriously because you're stuck with the name for a year minimum and that is a year of promoting your business/website with the name you don't wish to keep.

If you choose to not purchase a domain Wix can provide you with a free alternative which will include Wix in the name for example www.tipsy-travellers.wixsite.com/blog, which obviously doesn't look as good as our domain www.tipsy-travellers.com

To find where to add your domain follow the images below for the steps.

1. Click on site, then my dashboard

2. It will redirect you to your dashboard, then on the left hand side of the page click manage domain

3. Then it will take you to the domain page, where you can click add domain to connect your own and here you can also upgrade your plan to receive even more from Wix!

Step 4: Write the Title and Description

The title and description is the part which someone sees as soon as they click on your website, it's the place that gives your viewers their first impressions on the rest of the website. You can keep it simple and brief like we have, or you can give a little bit more information but don't drag it on, you will lose interest in your viewers almost immediately. Our tip to you would be to have your name in a large bold font and have a small tagline below, your favourite quote or something short and sweet that describes your website in a few short words.

Step 5: Write Your First Post

Writing your first post is very important, not only is it the first thing people will see when your site goes live, it is also the only thing anyone can read from you until your next post. So you need to make this one almost a taste of what is to come from your website, therefore you must ensure that this post is gripping and draws your readers in so that they want to read more! Give your readers a reason to come back to your site!

To write a post you must add the blog component to the page you require to post on, for example we have our blog posts on our home page and on the blog section of our website.

Step 6: Connect Your Domain

Once you have created your site, this is the moment you can now connect your domain, you can do all of the above without publishing, including picking your domain. Picking your domain is really important because you cannot pick something that someone else has already purchased and therefore owns copyright laws on that domain. Use the website GoDaddy for example to search your ideas to see if it's available, if it isn't they will even give you other ideas on similar names that you can have!

Step 7: optimise for Mobile

One thing that is very important to remember, a lot of today's website usage is through peoples mobile phones or tablets, and the set up of any website requires a more condensed version, so you really must optimise your site for a mobile friendly site. To do this just hit the mobile icon on the top right hand-side of the editor and it will ask you to switch to mobile view.