As you may have learned by now, Staingirl Kaye and I have this thing about researching a topic to death. Kaye and I started talking about our blog in September 2008. We went to Wordpress meetups to learn more about blogging. For the first time ever I heard words such as “themes”, “skins”, and “ftp”, which flew right over my head. We incorporated and planned. Which platform to use: Wordpress or Blogspot? Hosted or self-hosting? We deliberated ever so thoughtfully about where to register our domain name.  

Fortunately, a phone call to Kaye from Michael Luo of the New York Times  got us off our duffs. Within 24 hours, we selected a webhost, our blogging platform, a theme, and posted our first blog. We even had Google Adsense up and running. And yes, it was that easy.

Don’t get me wrong, our research did pay off, and ultimately we made fairly informed decisions that we were comfortable with. We will do a separate post about selecting a webhost as there are many things to consider. But we also learned that a lot of the steps in blogging are easier than they appear. When we finally went onto the Godaddy website to set up our website, we found that we could select a website that already included the Wordpress blogging platform. When we didn’t understand how to do something, Godaddy’s customer service representative set the whole thing up for us.

From everything we had read, we were under the impression that we would have to learn html to write our blogs and load them in through an ftp (a function I still don’t quite get). And forget about those plug-ins! Well, it turns out that Atahualpa, the theme we selected, has a visual mode, which takes care of links and headers the way a typical word processing application might. And there is great support through online forums for “how tos” and troubleshooting.

Need a function for your blog? Run a search through your plug-in application, and with one click of the button you have your plug-in. Want to place an affiliate ad in your blog? Cut and paste, Baby! OK, it’s not always that simple, but we found that we learned more by doing and exploring the features on our blogging platform, than with all the copious reading we did. We also learned that very often these monumental tasks were not as overwhelming as they appeared.

We will be posting a lot of what we learned in the hopes of simplifying your journey. These posts will include our thought process as we made certain decisions in our blogging journey as well as short “how to” posts. And we hope you’ll share your experiences with us, too.

But probably the biggest lesson we learned throughout the blogging process: If you have an idea, and are itching to start a blog, don’t let the fear technical issues daunt you. Just do it!