Kevin Frey: Hi! I'm Kevin Frey from TransEffect LLC, and today we're talking about how to create a website. In this segment, we're going to be discussing blogs. If you use the internet on a regular basis you're probably familiar with the term blog. Blog is a shortened form of web log, and a blog is basically an online interactive form for thought. Blog implies a certain format. You have posts and in each post there is a title of the post and there is a date of the post, there is the post content and there is an area for people to leave comments.

We're going to take a look at wordpress.

com. WordPress is a very popular blogging platform. The fact is you may not need an independently hosted website. If you want a way to complain about something or promote something, to post anything really, a blog might be the best way to go and the fact is you can sign up for WordPress and be blogging within five minutes. You just need a Username, our is transeffect, a Password and the passwords have to match. It will tell you how good of quality your password is. When you sign up you don't want people to be able to guess your password, and your Email Address is really important and as well as agree to the terms of service which you should probably read. That's it. You hit Next.

Once you sign up you can login to your blog and it's going to take you right to what's called a Dashboard. Do that and once you're here there is a section here called QuickPress and all you've got to do is come up for the title for your blog post, My New Blog Post, some content and then you can Upload and Insert an image, or music or video by clicking on the icons here. I'm actually -- I'm going to Upload an image. We're going to find the airplane in our Website directory. WordPress is going to do its thing. You can use a Caption and a Description and you can make the image a link also, align it as you like and even pick a different size for it. Then you insert it into the post and it does the work for you.

You can also create Tags for your post. My tag is going to say airplane and that will enable people to find your post when they're searching for things and then all you've got to do, you can either save it, publish it later or publish it immediately which is going to make that post active, people will be able to go to your site and see it. So right now if I go up here to visit site it's going to take me to transeffect.

wordpress.

com and you're going to see my blog post with the airplane here.

Now your layout is going to look different from mine because yours is probably going to be the default layout but you can go back to your Dashboard, changing a layout or theme is extremely easy. All you got to do is click on Appearance and Themes. I've picked a Fleur De Lys theme but you can go down here and there are pages and pages and pages of themes. You saw how my blog looked. I'm going to go ahead and click on a random page number, page 4 and I'm going to find the Rounded theme. You can either preview it. See what it looks like and if you like it you can go ahead and activate it or up here you can close it. Now that it's activated I'm going to visit my site again and that's it. A new theme.

You can categorize your blog post into different categories to make things easier. I might have -- you know a daily update category and then, you know, if I like the blog about airplanes, I might have a specific airplanes category.

The only other thing that I want to cover is RSS which you may have also heard of but it stands for really simple syndication and basically RSS is a way that people can read your blog without going to your blog webpage and in fact they just install a program called an RSS Reader and it works a lot like an email program, instead of getting emails they get notifications that you've posted a new blog and they get the contents of that blog, same as they receive an email.

Now if you want to give this a try, you can just go to your favorite search engine and search for RSS Reader and there are going to be plenty for you to try. So you can download it and install it and start reading other people's blogs that way. It can save time because you don't want to go to everybody's individual sites and read their blogs. The RSS Reader will just retrieve all that for you automatically.

That's really about it for the blog section. In our next segment we're going to cover some general best practices.