Friday, September 17, 2010

BP8_WordPress


I would like to create a sense of online community at my workplace, a forum for my co-workers to share their thoughts and tips with each other.  I chose WordPress this week to investigate because I believe that it may be a great option to help me accomplish this.

I don’t know much about blogging, so I read through the site’s “From Zero to Hero” section.  It was incredibly helpful and taught me how to create and maximize my blog’s potential.

WordPress gives you the option to make your content available from Search engines or from searches on the WordPress site, which has a community of 317,215 bloggers.  On the other hand, you can opt to run a private blog if you are someone like me and need to keep company information confidential.

Once the account is created, the site takes you to your dashboard, your back end controls to your blog, where you can easily update your information.  Your profile, privacy rating, and general settings can be tweaked with a few clicks.  You can even upload and crop a picture to run as the avatar for your blog.

Now this is really where it gets interesting: there is a ton of help available to create the most interesting and marketable blog possible.  The help section goes on to give you advice so that you can choose a strong focus for your blog, which will keep an audience coming back for more info.  Some popular themes are “photoblogs” or “petblogs.”

Additionally, the customized look and design of your blog needs to be consistent with the focus of your blog.  Just like websites, it needs to both look good and be user-friendly.  WordPress gives its bloggers the option to activate Widgets such as a search button or a link to Twitter, RSS, or Facebook feeds.  You can even add a list of your favorite links into your blog using a widget.


Available resources like Plinky.com to help generate unique ideas for blog topics or help with picking a compelling blog post title.

It’s easy to insert links, photos, audio, and if you upgrade your account, you can even add videos.  To get the most exposure possible to the online community, you can tag your blog with any relevant keywords.  Adding polls to your blog is one of the easiest ways to solicit feedback from your visitors.  Its easy to create and customize your blog on WordPress.




Photo References:

Cats vs. Dogs, Dennard, Susuan, 14 September 2010, http://sdennard.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/cats-versus-dogs/

Smiley face written in the sky during the inauguration of Governor Bob Martinez,
published by the State Library and Archives of Florida, 1987, http://www.flickr.com/photos/floridamemory/3328074451/

1 comment:

  1. Maia,
    WordPress is great blog resource. I have used this tool before and it is as powerful or even more so than Blogger. It's support system is vast and easy to access. I spent some time watching some of their video resources.
    You did a great job of introducing and explaining WordPress. I am assuming we are using Blogger to correlate with our Google account for Full Sail.
    If you are using this for your work place, I would be interested to see how it is be utilized. Please send me a link when it is fully running.
    I am pleased with your choice and your proper references.
    I'm sure the most popular blogs are pets and photos. Mine would a photo blog.

    ReplyDelete