If you have never set up a blog before this guide will literally take you step by step through the process of setting up your first blog. It also has tips for choosing a domain name that might help you get found more easily.

You can download the pdf guide here (no sign up or email required).

Setting up a WordPress Blog Guide Contents

Step 1 – Choosing a domain name for your blog
Step 2 – Checking domain availability and buying domains
Step 3 – Purchase your web hosting
Step 4 – Pairing up your domain name with your webspace
Step 5 – Installing WordPress to power your blog
Step 6 – General Settings
Step 7 – Setting your permalinks
Step 8 – Choosing a theme for your WordPress blog
Step 9 – Installing plugins on your WordPress blog
Step 10 – Writing your first posts and pages
Step 11 – Setting your home and blog page
Step 12 – Using Feedburner
Step 13 – Backing up your WordPress blog
Finding free and cheap images for your blog

Ben Vallack contacted me the other day to tell me about his new CMS (content management system) called SetSeed. Most people will have heard of WordPress, which is incredibly popular so it will be interesting to see how Setseed develops as the new kid on the block.

One of the key ideas behind the CMS seems to be that we, as designers can set up the CMS and make it look as we want and then hand it over to the client allowing them to edit the text they need to without being able to fiddle with (and break) the design.

Some features of Setseed CMS

• SetSeed is a self-hosted CMS which lets you rapidly build and deploy complete websites and online stores for your clients.
• The CMS interface is beautiful, easy and lets your clients control their content without breaking your design. Use your own logo on the CMS and even in our training videos for your clients.
• A single installation powers all your sites, so everyone’s always up to date. Breath life into your front-end code with the flexible Smarty template system and full CSS/Javascript control.
• Pay a one off low-cost fee per site no expensive monthly payments – FREE DOMAIN KEY (ONE PER PERSON ONLY) with the special offer from GDB, just visit this page and enter the code gdb2011

I haven’t had time to try it yet, so why don’t you head of to Setseed, grab you free domain key with the code gdb2011 and let me know what you think.

1. Blogging Helps Designers Get Found in Google (SEO)

You probably already know this but google loves blogs and fresh content so when you blog about design you increase your chances of getting found by potential clients. I can by personal experience say that through both this blog and my personal design blog I have received several thousand pounds of work that otherwise I wouldn’t have got. Not only can potential clients see your work but they can get an insight into your personality through the way you write and the way you interact with people that comment on your blog.

Blogging can help you find both international or local work. Most people probably see blogging as an opportunity for designers to do work for clients further afield but I also use it to find local clients. By trying to optimise my personal blog for local words such as using my county in some of my post headings I will be more likely to be found by local companies.

2. Finding Full Time Design Employment Opportunities

Just as a blog helps a freelance designer find full time work it can also help a designer to find full time work. As I mentioned before a blog is a small insight to the type of person you are alongside a portfolio of your work. You could also go as far to create video posts showcasing you and your work. A blog is also somewhere you can direct potential employers to when you are sending out letters and emails to prospective employers. The potential employer can view your work and see your level of knowledge and enthusiasm.

Jacob Cass from Just Creative Design received a job offer via twitter which I should imagine was down to his very popular blog which you can read about here.

3. Designers Can Make friends and Contacts

The blogosphere enables you to contact any other blogging designer to both ask and offer advice. In the past I have contacted fellow bloggers who have helped me and in turn I have answered questions through emails and comments from novice designers. It never ceases to amaze me how helpful people you have never met before can be. You may also be lucky enough to find people to collaborate with on projects (not something I have done yet myself).

4. Opportunites and Design Exposure

When I first started blogging David Airey already had a fairly popular blog, though nothing like as popular as it is now. After his first blog – http://www.davidarey.com he launched his incredibly popular http://www.logodesignlove.com early 2008, which not only made him become an authority in the area of logo design and I am sure allowed him deservedly to increase his prices, but also led to a book deal with Peachpit Press which you can read about here.

Maybe not every designer blogger will end up with a book deal but there are also design magazine opportunities. Open up issues of Computer Arts and some of the articles you will find written by a designer blogger. I personally wrote a small piece “last word” for Computer Arts Projects a couple of years ago after being emailed by one of the editors. Not only was this cool to do but I got paid for it too. There are also opportunities to write for high profile websites – Jennifer Farley, Laughing Lion Design now writes for Sitepoint and John Boardley Ilovetypography writes Linotype’s monthly newsletter.

5. Extra Cash from Advertising and Affiliate Programs

So for most of us this is probably not going to make a fortune, but a bit of paid advertising can cover your web hosting costs.

If you are writing reviews about products you like, in my opinion, there is no harm in using an affiliate link to the product as long as the review is genuine.

6. Design Freebies

Be honest, everyone loves a freebie. If you write a design blog with reasonable coverage you will probably be offered some free stuff to review whether it be free ebooks, real books software or other equipment.Personally I have received a few ebooks whichI have read. I reviewed the ones I liked but not the ones I didn’t. I have also received a couple of books, a couple of bits of software (one after I had already done a review of a trial version) and most recently a Wacom Bamboo tablet which I will review when I have played with it a bit more. I can only imagine what some of the big design blogs receive to try out.

7. Blogging to Sell your Themes, Graphics, Designs, Tshirts or Designer Merchandise

Designers who create web themes such as WordPress themes can use a blog as a way of promoting their themes. Paid themes can generate a lot of revenue for some designers such as Brian Gardner who has developed a successful business selling premium themes, blog design and internet marketing. Blogs could also be used to generate traffic to sell vector graphics, photos, prints and posters or other merchandise.

8. Turning a Blog Post into a Business

Collis Ta’eed who was previously a web designer ran a blog called NorthxEast where he posted an article on his blog about freelancing. It was a big hit and realised that a site/blog about freelancing might be successful and set up the incredibly popular Freelanceswitch, he has also created Flashden and Tuts+. You only have to look at Freelanceswitch’s advertising prices alone (to see what a good business it is) not even taking into account the jobs board, ebooks and affiliate sales. You can also listen to a podcast interview with Collis here.

As a designer, do you think it is important to blog?

For tips on freelancing straight to your inbox click here

Recommended Resources

Free guide to setting up your wordpress blog including SEO basics (from Graphic Design Blog)

Blog Profits Blueprint (FREE) : A free downloadable report from Yaro Starak on the best ways to create a profitable blog

Book: ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Hosting: Hostgator, A good hosting provider for a blog who have one click WordPress Install and video tutorials to get you started. I have had very good customer support from them.

1. Go to your Google Docs Account (or open up a free google account if you haven’t already got one). Google docs now lets you upload pdfs so you can read them online which is pretty neat. You can upload all your pdf ebooks and organise them into folders. Slight problem though, this is great if you have an internet connection, but what about if you don’t. This is where the Good reader App comes in.

2. The Good Reader App lets you link up to your Google docs account and download any PDFs from there to your Ipad. You can then organise them into folders and read them whenever you want without an internet connection. The Good Reader App has a nicer interface than google docs for reading your PDFs too. Of course you can easily delete PDFs from your IPad when you have read them too (while still keeping a copy in Google docs)

I contacted my host – Hostgator and asked if they could reupload the latest version they had for me back to my blog. Within a couple of hours they had come back to me and said the problem was a corrupted database and they had repaired it for me. So thank you Hostgator and don’t make the same mistake I did, back up your blog regularly, mosts hosts let you do this through your cpanel or there are WordPress plugins available.

After a big search I still hadn’t found one and had little response from the WordPress forum so I tried the forum over at blogging tips where help was much more forthcoming. Sarah from Stuff by Sarah kindly created a plugin called Page Menu Editor which did exactly what I needed and I am sure will be useful to many people. Sarah’s website also has a lot of other plugins and advice which are well worth a look.

1. Website examples of WordPress being used as a CMS
2. My endeavours as a beginner to use WordPress as a CMS
3. A series of tips for using WordPress as a CMS by graphic and web designer Jennifer Farley from Laughing Lion Design
4. A series of links about using WordPress as a content management system and useful WordPress Plugins that I have found when trying to research the subject.

If you are looking to set up your own WordPress website you can download my FREE GUIDE HERE (no sign up or email required)

1. Website examples of word of WordPress being used as a CMS

As many of you probably know as well as being used as a blog WordPress can also be used as a CMS or if you didn’t know here are a few examples of sites that use it. (Found via http://www.codex.wordpress.org). Click on any example to go to the sites.

2. My endeavours as a beginner to use WordPress as a CMS

I have been experimenting with WordPress as a content management system myself, all be it by adapting an existing template as my coding skills are still not very strong (so please be gentle with me).

My experiments have been on a site I wanted to create for my characters designs The Weather Pops. I was looking to create a simple website fairly quickly as I am attending the brand licensing show in October.

After searching for a suitable theme to start with I settled on the Blixed WordPress Theme for its simplicity and the fact that the pages did not have a side bar, as I only wanted header navigation on my main pages. I tweaked the CSS on the pages so that the width of the content was the same width as the header.

The newer versions of WordPress give you the ability to create a Static home page, ideal if you want to use WordPress as a CMS. You can set this in your admin panel under OPTIONS – READING

What I was really looking for though was something that would allow me to specify both a static front page and a blog page as I wanted my website to function as a website first, with a secondary blog. I found a plugin which allowed me to do this called Filosofo Home-Page Control which allowed me to set both a home page and a “virtual” location for my blog. If you look at http://www.theweatherpops.com/blog it appears that the blog aspect of the site is in a blog folder, when in fact it isn’t, it is just part of the rest of the site.

The website is very basic but it gave me a taste of what could be done with WordPress.

3. Using WordPress as a CMS by Jennifer Farley from Laughing Lion Design

http://www.laughing-lion-design.net
Jennifer is an experienced web and graphic designer and also a design instructor. Make sure you take a look at her blog for loads of photoshop tutorials. Jennifer’s Laughing Lion Design website also uses WordPress as a CMS

I took my first tentative steps from using Blogger to WordPress (WP) as my blogging platform about 8 or 9 months ago. Initially my plans were to use WP solely for blogging. I had read quite a bit about it and lots of the blogs I was visiting seemed to be using it so I decided to give it a go. Within a very short period of using WP I realised that it offered so much more than just making it easy to publish a blog.

So what else can you do with this baby?

It is possible to use WP as a complete Content Management System (CMS). Not only can you write and edit posts easily, you can also write, edit and add PAGES easily and for me that’s what makes it so great. This means that you can set up the design or look and feel of your site and continue to add as many web pages to your site as you need, when you need them. No more pleading with clients to REALLY think about each section they need before you start designing, if they forget something you can add it in later with little or no problems. Many people believe that they must have the blog posts on the front of their website if using WP but the fact is you can set any static page as your home page and have your blog “inside” the main site.

Another factor which makes WP a joy to work with is the number of superb plugins that are available. WP is an Open Source application which means it has been developed by a community of people who are genuinely interested in creating good quality, FREE applications. Plugins could be considered smaller, “helper” applications that plug in to WP and give extra functionality to your site. To find out more about the type of plugins available check out – http://www.codex.wordpress.org/plugins
So let’s take a look at a couple of examples of where you could use WP to manage different types of website.

a. News or Magazine Site

WP lends itself very well to this type of site. Feature articles can be kept on the front page with latest news listed chronologically on another part of the page. You could also set up different category pages such as Fashion or Sport. To see a WP theme using this style, check out Gridlock at http://www.hyalineskies.com

b. Gallery Site
As well as displaying images, gallery sites sometimes allow commenting (no problem for WP) and rating of individual items or lists of top rated items. This sort of application can be put together using WP with the WPG2 plugin – http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpg2/ which allows random, recent, daily, weekly, popular images, and albums to be displayed as image blocks in the WordPress Sidebar.

c. Portfolio Site
Very similar to a gallery site, the portfolio site usually consists of one or more pages of thumbnails which when clicked allow the visitor to see a larger version of the work. You could of course include the WPG2 plugin to allow rating, but if you’d rather just show your work without them, a wonderful plugin that you can use is NextGen. This is a plugin I have used for many of my clients and I cannot tell you what a time saver it is compared to the old method of individually resizing thumbs and then linking them up. Great stuff.

d. E-Commerce Site
These days, it’s very important to be able to add some sort of E-commerce functionality to a site. Everyone has something to sell, don’t they? This type of site is generally made up of product page with descriptions and thumbnails. Also required is integration with some type of payment service. I use Paypal as the payment service for my clients because it really is simple to setup. But what about the E-commerce functionality? How does that tie in with WP? Well needless to say there is a plugin available …

The imaginatively titled “WP E-commerce” plugin is available for download from http://www.instinct.co.nz It’s one I’ve used on two client sites without too many hassles. The main problem I came across with this was the particular themes I had designed didn’t quite sit right with some of the product pages, but that was my fault rather than the plugin.

So that’s a short round up of just some of the ways you can take your WP blog and turn it into a fully fledged CMS with tons of functionality. You’ll find there are plugins for all kinds of things, the ones I listed above are some that I like and use for my own and my client sites, there are many more out there to play with.

4. A series of links about using WordPress as a content management system and useful WordPress Plugins

Semiologic
Semiologic is a WordPress theme that has been designed so it can be used to build a website rather than just a blog – ie. act as a content management system. I downloaded it put it on a test site to experiment. It basically contains a series of wizards and set up features that you can activate without any coding knowledge. There are a lot of layout variations you can choose from – 1 column, 2 column, 3 column and you can choose the width of your website as well, there are a few skins build in too. What I though looked pretty good was how easily you could duplicate the skin and create/amend it to adapt to your own liking if you had a bit of CSS knowledge. Using widgets you can drag and drop what you have in the sidebar too. (if you choose to have a sidebar)

A small selection of prizes up for grabs include:

• Logo design from David Airey.
• Blog review from Aaron Russell of miLienzo
• Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill of Nate Whitehill dot Com. .
• Website critique from Randa Clay of Randa Clay Design.
• Revolution Premium WordPress theme package (personal package) from Brian Gardner.
• One year’s hosting and blog setup from John Boardley of I Love Typography
• Logo Design designed by myself at Graphic Design Blog

To see the full list of prizes and how to enter see David Airey’s Blog

What is something that would surprise people about you and design?
I never really intended becoming a designer, to be honest when I went and did a 2 year General Art and Design course when I was 18 I thought I would be a fine artist. At the end of the 2 years I was quite enjoying illustration but still was not sure whether to go in this direction or fine art. One of my tutors said why not consider graphic design, so after taking a look at the graphic design course that’s what I decided to do. What I found really difficult at first was working with type, I was used to working with images, but typography was something new.

If you could design one blogger’s site for free, who would it be?
To be honest at the moment I don’t think I would dare offer to design another blogger’s site (even for free) because I am still learning CSS and wouldn’t want to make something that didn’t work in all browsers . However I have been incredibly inspired by Brian Gardner who revealed that in only a year he learned how to code and design beautiful WordPress templates and am determined that I soon will be more confident.

What blog platform do you prefer, and why?
Definitely WordPress, which I only discovered about 6 months ago. I am amazed at its general ease of use and how search engine friendly it is. I did once try blogger.com which I found quite inflexible. I have also dabbled with Drupal and Joomla, both of which I found incredibly complicated to use.

Aside from your own, what is your favorite blog theme/template?
I really like Grid Focus which I think Johno at Redsil has used to great effect. I also like the incredibly popular Vertigo theme by Brian Gardner and Copyblogger theme, which is nice and simple and I think could be easily adapted to great effect.

Do you have a blog-reading guilty pleasure?
I don’t really have a blog reading guilty pleasure, but every now and again I like to read invention websites and blogs (is that bad?).

I am tagging James Dempsey – Creative Guy, Lauren – Creative Curio, Joe Drinker – Four Bux, Kat – Katize and Nate at Nate Creates