My First Steps in Blogging
Ever since I dreamed of blogging my passion, oh how I wanted to have my blog look like one of those beautiful professional ones I see all over. Clicking and exploring the blog pages is so easy and fun as everything that appears to my eyes looks stunning and flawless, but I had no idea there is so much work to be done before a blog can be on the web for people to enjoy–until I began trying to get mine started.
My desire to blog started back in 2003 when my doctor told me that I had over a 90% chance to have a baby after 4 pregnancy losses. I was over the moon, and wanted to blog and share every step of my daughter’s life-journal with my families and friends across the world. Unfortunately, I had to put everything on hold for a long time when my pregnancy got more complicated and my daughter was born 2 months early. Long story short, the difficult beginning gave way to much better years, but they’ve been busy years that have gone by fast.
Finally, I’m here online with more passion and ideas. It’s time for me to start putting my pieces about blogging together. I truly had no idea how to get it started!
It would be easier to hire a professional web designer to do it for me, but that would cost me a fortune, especially when I don’t have solid ideas on how I wanted my site to be or look exactly. Doing everything by myself is the only option I have, and it has been a good way to figure out the design and function of my site too: starting from square 1.
Thank you to all the bloggers who put out so many helpful articles and tutorials about how to start your own blog for people like me to learn from. I spent day after day reading advice I found online, and many of the sites showed me the small steps which seemed to be easy enough, but took a long time to put together as a whole.
I’m going to keep every step of my blog journal to remind me of the process as I’m sure my point of view about building my own blog will change over time!
In Spain. Late September, 2016:
I started out by choosing my domain name, and that was like finding a needle in a haystack. I finally got the domain name I really wanted, and it was hard to believe it wasn’t taken! Godaddy.com was the best place for me to get my domain.
The first step of having my own domain name gave me a big relief, but what to do next?
The next step is more serious, and requires some commitment. I had to choose a hosting plan and a platform where I wanted my site to be.
I compared 2 hosting companies suggested from the articles I read, and waited for 2 days. I chose hostgator.com for my hosting plan based on the comments I read about their customer service.
Now, I have my domain name and hosting plan purchased, but in order to get my site up and running I needed a platform for it. I was leaning toward wordpress as I heard about it since I wanted to blog 12 years ago, and every article I read suggested the same, so I went with the flow.
Wow, I got 3 things done fast.
It’s early October, 2016 now. Let’s see what I need to do next:
