Setting Up a New WordPress Blog

good idea

There is a project that has been bouncing around the back of my mind for a few years, and I am ready to go forward with the idea. I obtained the domain names a few years ago and they have been dormant all this time. But after researching blogs for my presentation on Beyond the Blog: Tips for Turning Your Blog into a Book last fall, my eyes were opened to the types of weird and wacky blogs that were either a) being turned into books or b) being sold for huge amounts of money. I think this new blog idea can experience the success of the ones I had been reading about.

I forgot how much decision-making takes place when establishing a new site. What platform do you want to be on? Blogger? Tumblr? WordPress, and if so WordPress.com or WordPress.org? What theme do you want? How about the graphics? So much to consider! I hired an illustrator to come up with a "character" for lack of a better word. We met on Monday and it was so fun to watch her draw up ideas on her tablet right in front of me. We came up with a pretty good sketch of what it will look like. She should have it officially drawn this weekend. Then I decided I want to have a special font for the name of the blog and the tag line that I will be using. So that meant an hour pouring over fonts and determining which one would look good with my "character".

We are on our way though. I am going with WordPress.org, and I have my theme and font selected. My web designer is customizing the theme to be more in keeping with our thoughts of what this new brand should look like. Hopefully by next week I will be able to roll it out. Stay tuned...

Owning Your Domain Name

Kim Wolterman at Blogging for Authors

Over the weekend I presented information on blogging for authors to St. Louis Publishers Association members. I have written a post about it over at my Write Formation blog. Unfortunately you can't read it right now. I will get to the problem in a minute. As I was doing research in preparation for my presentation I learned about some things that need to be adjusted on my own blogs. For example, on myhousehistory.net my home page is static, meaning it does not change. It was designed that way on purpose as I wanted it to look like a website as opposed to just a blog. My blog posts are entered on the "How To" tab of the website which is several pages down in the site. While the website looks good, having the new posts so deep in the website means that the web crawlers which search for new material and thus have them appear in a Google search are probably not finding my posts. This answers some questions I have always had about why they don't appear in the Google Alerts I have set up, and perhaps why readers are not finding my site. I am currently looking into how to rectify that while still keeping the look that I want.

But what I also learned is that having a blog on blogger.com and not owning my own domain name is also hurting my search engine optimization results. For example, this blog is kimwolterman.blogspot.com which sends my Google "juice" to blogspot (AKA Blogger) instead of me. The way around that is to purchase the domain name kimwolterman.com (which I actually already own, by the way - just haven't used it on this blog), and have the blogspot.com site redirect to my domain name. I have not attempted any changes to this blog yet, but Saturday night I purchased writeformation.com directly through Google (which owns Blogger). The reason I did this is because they said they would take care of all the behind the scenes changes which need to be made for the re-directing.

Sounds easy, right? No such luck. The new domain name results in an error code when you type in the URL. That would be bad enough except that beginning yesterday even the old blogspot.com URL for my writing blog results in the error code. So no one can see my blog at all now. They had said it could take up to three days for the transfer to take place, but that in the meantime your old URL would work. Wrong! And this is why I never tried to change anything before now. I am certainly not going to mess around with changing the domain here until I get the other blog straightened out.

Google Me

The St. Louis Genealogical Society had a meeting at the Viking Hotel yesterday on how to Google your family tree. The speaker Dan Lynch has, in fact, written a book coincidentally (not!) named "Google Your Family Tree". He is an excellent speaker and I learned a lot about how to more efficiently and effectively use Google. I typically use the Yahoo search engine because I like my Yahoo home page, but now that I know the power behind Google I will be surfing a whole new wave. I had no idea that there are numerous filters available to help you get a better search result.

Another interesting thing involves something called "cached", and I don't mean in a "Show me the money!" kind of way. Have you ever clicked on a web link only to get the dreaded error message that says this website is not available? Well, off to the side of the link listed in the search is the word "cached". If you click on it you will be taken to the static pages of what used to be shown on the website. Perhaps the information you are looking for is there, or at least a contact person so you see about getting the information. If a plus sign (+) shows up under a link in your search, that indicates that Google thinks that particular website has other pages relevant to your search.

When Dan got to the part of his presentation covering Google maps, it got pretty exciting. And not only because the fire alarms went off and we had to vacate the building for half an hour. (Fire trucks came but never did hear if it was the real deal.) Anyway, Dan went live online for this segment and it was amazing. Imagine going to the town in Ireland where your ancestors were from - from your own home. Or how about looking for landmarks when you are heading out to a store or business you haven't been to in the past. OR...what about if your are doing house research and want to see what the house looks like now??? I need to blog about that on my house history website for sure.

All in all, a very productive use of my Saturday. Let the searching begin!

What's the Buzz?

Last night I set up a Facebook account and a Twitter account. Now I just need to figure out what in the world to do with them! I keep hearing that if you want to be heard and seen, you need all these networking options up and running. They are supposed to be helpful in promotion. I'm not promoting anything yet, but I figured I would get a head start on them before my book is published. I can see how a person could spend the whole day blogging, tweeting and writing on the wall of various Facebook accounts. How in the world will anything else get done? I'm already falling short on keeping my three blogs active. Good thing the next Publishers Association meeting is on organization. Sounds like I'll be needing tips on keeping all my writings in order!