PE2 WordPress

It is extremely easy to set up a WordPress account!  I’ve created an account under my name that I am going to use as a test before I create my actual company blog.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Set up for the blog literally only takes a few minutes.  After clicking on the “Sign up now” button, getting a blog is as easy as entering a username, password, email address, and picking your privacy settings.  I’ve clicked on keeping my blog private for now.

Once logged in, clicking on “My Account” takes you to the place where you can edit all kinds of things.  “The Dashboard” has all the basics: how to post, the comments that you’ve had on your posts, drafts of your posts, and even stats on your blog.

I’m most interested in the tab on “Upgrades.”  Here, once you’ve already created an account, is where you can finally find the prices for extra features.  You can add a domain for a one time fee of $17 or upgrade to VideoPress, which will allow you to upload, store, and share videos for $59.97 per year.  You can also get space upgrades to store media, and the price there depends on how much extra storage you need.  For $29.97 per year you can ensure that your side has no ads.  Those all sound like great features and the price is reasonable, but they are not quite what I’m seeking.

At the far right of this tab, I came across just what I want: Unlimited Private Users for $29.97 per year!  That’s a great price, and I’m sure that I can pitch that number to my boss and get a good answer.  But wait, there’s more!  There’s also the upgrade option to customize your blog’s appearance beyond the general themes that are available.  This is only $14.97, and I’m sure that if my department is going to go for something like this site, they would want it to have company branding.  I will keep these two options in mind.

Here's the current look of my blog

Moving on with my settings, I wanted to choose a basic theme and layout for my blog.  Knowing that my company colors are orange and gray, I did a custom search for themes that included orange in them.  I came across a very elegant looking theme called Vostok that I’ll go with for now.  Until I can get that customized feature working for me, this will work quite well.

Now I’ve got my theme, I want to add some widgets.  For now, it looks like a “blogroll” or a list of common links will be great, because I can post links to other sites that have industry and company updates.  I also enabled comments from here and set the page to show up to 10 recent comments.  There’s a lot more widget options, but I don’t think many are relevant for what I’m trying to accomplish right now. 

I think now that I am fully set up and ready to start blogging!  My next post here will be about how I plan to implement my WordPress blog at work.