Weebly Websites

Feeling wobbly about starting your own website? Like to have a trial run before you get more training, information and experience?

Then why not try out Weebly - Website Creation Made Easy. It is designed for the complete beginner (or the lazy advanced person).

You choose a template. You can use your mouse to drag and drop the various elements you want to include in your website such as photos, videos, text or ads.

You can also use it to create a blog to accompany your site.

Best of all, it is completely free.

There is no charge to host your site and you can create an unlimited number of pages.

So if you want to start a website dedicated to a hobby or a passion, why not test things out with Weebly.com?

You may like it so much you decide to stick with it. Or you may be inspired to move on to a website builder which gives you the flexibility to create your own unique Look and Feel such as SBI.

10 Things I Didn't Know About Blogging...

...that may or may not be common knowledge to everyone else:

1. Blogs didn't start off as online diaries. They were lists of favourite websites or links to new sites as they were launched online in the early days of the internet.

2. The noun and verb 'blog' was coined by Peter Merholz who turned the word weblog into 'we blog'.

3. You can have photoblogs and artblogs made up of visual material.

4. Video blogs are called vlogs.

5. Dreamlogs or dreamblogs, online journals describing dreams and nightmares are a genre in itself.

6. The blogosphere is the collective name for all blogs on the internet - the blogging universe.

7. Apparently 'slog' is the term for a site weblog, they call it a slice of a website- that is, a blog that is integrated within a business website.

8. There is a phenomenon called 'splogging' - spam blogs that steal material from other blogs and other naughty things.

9. Technorati, the internet search engine for blogs, indexes about 75 million blogs.

10. There are Blog Carnivals dedicated to particular themes: collections of high quality blog posts on a specific topic.

The Slog of the Blog

Because blogging is time sensitive, it can be a hard old slog trying to keep it up to date. Blogs need constant attention and feeding with new posts otherwise they wither away and die.

Some people advocate blogging two or three times a day.

I get a strange feeling of guilt if I haven't blogged for a bit. I haven't posted to my other blog for some time now due to busyness.

So if you are thinking about setting up a blog, it is worth considering how much time and commitment you have for keeping it up to date and fresh and alive with news, developments and posts according to your blog's theme.

To Blog or not to Blog

When you are thinking of creating an online presence as a business or a hobby, should you set up a website for yourself or a blog or both?

A weblog, mostly known as a blog, is usually described as an online diary, written in reverse chronlogical order but with the most recent entry displayed first.

Nowadays the blog has evolved into the ultimate promotion tool whether you're promoting your products or promoting yourself.

I decided to set up a blog rather than a website to record my research into creating a website firstly because I am not an authority on the subject.

2) I wanted to chronicle it as a beginner who is investigating, researching and gathering information and knowledge.

3) Because in the world of the Internet, everything changes with a click of the mouse, and it would be easier for me to record the latest developments and changes through a blog than the comparatively static medium of a website.

4) I wanted to experiment with blog monetization. (This blog was originally born in WordPress.com but when I found that I wouldn't be able to monetise the blog in WordPress, I decided to abscond to Blogger. There are some who believe that monetising a blog goes against the spirit of blogging. But this is an experiment. Well, that's my excuse anyway.)

5) Sheer laziness: it is dead easy to set up a blog and can be done for free.

The three blog services I've heard of are Blogger (obviously), Wordpress and Typepad.

On Wordpress.com, you can set up a blog for free just as with Blogger. With Wordpress.org, you can own your blog, monetize your blog and set it up on your own web host. Both versions of Wordpress are free.

Typepad is suited for business or professional blogging purposes and has a monthly fee ranging from $4.95 to $29.95 depending on which level you choose.

This is not my first blog. I have a self-help blog which is set out in a traditional sort of blog format with archives and a facility for visitors to add comments, if I choose.

I also have a blog on my main website which I don't manually have much to do with. My web host Site Build It arranges all the new pages I create for my website in chronological order into a bloglike format. Don't ask me how. But it is a very handy tool to have - even though, in my opinion, it isn't strictly a blog.

I particularly like this description of what a blog is NOT .

On the other hand, because of the individual nature of blogging, a blog can be anything you want it to be. I remember the slogan I once read on the Hollywood Offender Blog: where the only opinion that matters is MINE.