Name your Blog

Creating a Blog for the first time and getting it set up the with a unique style can be a very frustrating endeavor. It's my hope that by documenting the steps I used in the creation of this blog I can provide answers to a lot of your questions, making building and customizing your first blog much easier.
The first order of business was to go to my Blogger "Dashboard" this is the control panel from where all your blog changes will be made. If you don't have a Blogger account set up yet, don't worry its very simple and the best part is that it's free. Once your account is open just log in to the Dashboard with your User Name and Password and click the "Create a Blog" button. which takes you to step two.

Choosing a name for your blog
This is a very important element in creating a blog. You want something people can remember, is creative and of course, available. You want a name that says something about the subject your will be blogging about. Blogatech, a play on the word Architect is obviously going to be about techniques for blog design and creation. The firsts item you see is "Blog Title" this is the name that will be displayed in the very top left corner of your browsers window. In my case I chose blogatech. The next item is the URL or address that will be used to access your blog. In the case of a free blogspot account your URL will be what's referred to as a Sub-Domain (example: http://yourname.blogspot.com). Under this item there is a setting that lets you check the availability of a desired name. It will also give you suggestions if the name you want is taken. Also try other options if your name is taken. For example my original idea blogitect was not available so I came up with blogatech. Had that been taken blog-a-tech would have been a good option. My final address results were http://blogatech.blogspot.com and this is the information I will use any time I'm asked for my site URL.

There are quite a few free hosting services like Blogspot that serve up your blog under a sub-domain ( which is a great way to start blogging. These are the top sites offering free weblog software and hosting with sub-domains:

• Blog Spot, for weblogs created with blogger.
  
• Wordpress
  
• Xanga
  
• thebloghoster
  
• Journal Home

There are plenty more and new services are popping up all the time. I am big Blogger fan do to the ability to modify or create your own template, so blogspot is my choice. I have used Wordpress and although its a clean design and easy to use the free hosting platform does not allow you to alter the standard templates. If your like I am and want to hotrod your template a free account with wordpress is going to be a disappointment for you. If your your a less adventurous type and just want a quick, easy and aesthetically pleasing blog, then wordpress would be a good option. You can jump right into writing that novel with out have to learn any new tricks.


If your goal is to win a bloggies awards and expect to get a huge amount of traffic like boingboing then your going to want to purchase your own domain name. I should say rent it because you will have to continually re-new the rights to your domain name Again your going to have to do a search to see if your desired name is available and you can do this through the same site you use to handle you domain registration. You can shop around for the best deals but you will probably find it from one of these sites:

• GoDaddy.com
  
• www.networksolutions.com
  
• Register.com
  
• Aplus.Net
  
• www.hostway.com
  
• www.mydomain.com

Using your own domain and outside hosting service would require that you select the advanced set up feature at this point and is beyond the scope of this article.

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