Yzabel / August 15, 2005

No, I’m not starting a new one myself; this post actually got inspired by the questions Darren Rowse posted on ProBlogger, and I wondered about how many things exactly would’ve to be taken into account when starting a new blog. Even though I haven’t many years of blogging behind me (I guess you could say I really started in the spring of 2004 only), I think I’m now able to put the finger on tips centered on this theme—I may not always have followed them myself from the start, but now I sure know them.Please note that I’ll be posting these tips in two separate entries, as it is quite a long read.Why blogging?First of all comes the aim of the blog itself. Blogging just for the sake of blogging isn’t going to get you very far, so one should question why they’re doing it. Is it to give news to friends and family by keeping a place easy to update as well as to check? Is it to promote a book, a product, freelance services? Is it to share knowledge and reflexions about a specific field (what one could call “niche blogs”), or to simply gather news about said field? Will the blog have a professional orientation, or a personal one? There are many purposes to a blog, and depending on what you want to craft here, much of what’s going to follow will have to be planned in a different way. One shouldn’t write on a business blog the way they write about their families on a personal page, unless they want their professional readership seriously wonder about what they’re up to.Make also sure that you will know what to write about for a long time. Granted, this isn’t a problem in the case of personal blogs: life will always provide you with events. Things are different for niche/professional blogs: if you’re not sure that in a few weeks from now, you’ll still have material to post about, perhaps focusing on a narrow topic isn’t a good idea to start with. So, make sure that you’ll know what to write about in order to publish at least two or three times a week.Domain nameWhile it’s not mandatory for a purely personal blog, in the case of a business blog (or at least one that you intend on being known by more than a handful of people), this is a detail I’d strongly advice to take into account before starting to advertise your blog. A blog changing URL once a year due to being hosted on a different service each time will confuse people; moreover, doing so will surely make you lose part of your readership. Not everybody will immediately follow a redirect link, update their feeds or care about keeping in touch every few days to make sure nothing has changed. A set domain name will at least ensure you 1) that your readers will always know where to find you, even if you decide to switch from a blog provider to a standalone platform (see next point), and 2) that you get an easily recognizable URL for your blog (don’t choose some obscure domain name! It should reflect the theme of your blog, or at least its name). For business blogs especially, it’s likely important to have “your” domaine name. With services selling domain names for around 10$ nowadays, getting one is not very expensive anymore.Blog provider or standalone platform?This step depends on the very first point I listed, as well as on the means one is ready to invest. I myself tend to prefer use a standalone platform, such as WordPress, MovableType, Expression Engine or whatever other tool strikes my fancy (platforms such as WordPress are quite good and free, it can be an effective way to start). It’s all about “control” here: control over the database holding your posts, about how and when to save/restore it, about being the real master on board. Platforms also offer more features. When I plan a blog that is supposed to hold for more than a few months, I want to be sure that in one year, two years, three years, it can still be around if I want it so. Hence my advice about a domain name, and about hosting your own blog, which can be more expensive in the beginning if not already owning some usable webspace, but gives you way more freedom.If not tech-savvy enough at the moment, or not feeling like installing and tweaking such a platform “just to try and start a new blog”, there are quite an amount of services around here to help a new blogger start: Blog*Spot, BlogCity, TypePad (if you don’t mind paying)… For more personal blogs, LiveJournal or Diaryland can be way enough too. Simply keep in mind that the day these services decide to shut down (nothing’s really carved in stone when it comes to websites), or change in a way that doesn’t please you, it’s going to be hard to retrieve the content of your blog in a simple and timely fashion; the same goes for the comments attached to each post. Also, let’s admit that a professional blog hosted on Diaryland address simply wouldn’t look very… professional, period.With that, you’ll be ready to get to the core of things: design, content, and getting the word about your blog out.blogging