My Blogging Journey: Part One

Starting this business and designing my blog was such a wonderful learning experience for me.  I loved learning about blog design as much as I could, and it's been a blast to keep on changing and tweaking things as time has gone on.  I know lots of you reading this have blogs, so I thought you might be interested to know how I went about designing my blog, and you might pick up a few tips along the way!

I'm going to be starting an ongoing series about my blogging journey, and including links, tips, and little tutorials along the way.  I won't be posting on any particular schedule; I'll just add a post to this series every now and then.  Today, I thought I would give you the basics, focusing mostly on Blogger.

Let's start at the beginning.  Blogger.

I really love using Blogger as my service provider.  It's incredibly user-friendly, and while I suppose some stereotypes of Blogger blogs have them looking boring or typical, there is so much you can do with Blogger to help your blog look just the way you want it.  Depending on how things go in the future, I'm not necessarily set on staying with Blogger forever, but it's been the perfect way to start out my business and blog, and I'm very content with it right now!  If you're considering making a blog, go with Blogger.  I truly think it's the best choice, not only because it's so popular, but because it really is both easy to use and flexible.

I'm not sure if anyone has had this question in the past, but I understand that some of you might be thinking "wait, she uses Blogger?"  Her URL doesn't have "blogspot" in it!  How can this be?"

The answer, my friends, is custom domains.

 Let me tell you a little bit about the way I set up my blog to have a custom URL, carrieannedesign.com.  First of all, here's why I wanted a custom domain name.  I can think of couple reasons.

1. It's easier for people to remember.
2. It sounds more professional for business purposes.
3. It's more personalized and more unique to me.  There are lots of people whose addresses say ____.blogspot.com, but no one else with my exact domain name.  
4. It is so easy to set up if you go through Blogger!

To me, those were great reasons, and I did it.  You do have to pay a yearly fee for the domain, but it is not exorbitant, and it was well worth it for me.  If you want a custom domain through Blogger, here's what you do:

• From your Blogger Dashboard, go to Settings > Publishing.
• At the top of that page, there should be a message that says you are publishing with Blogger, and it should give you your Blogger URL as well.
• You should also see an option on that page that says "Switch to: custom domain."
• Click on "custom domain," and Blogger will automatically guide you through the process of choosing your own domain name and paying for it.  I found it relatively simple to complete these steps and begin publishing on my own domain.

So, that should answer your questions about the domain name thing, and also let you know how easy it is to switch to a custom domain if you want!

Another thing I want to draw your attention to about Blogger is the design page.  If you click on "Design" when your Blogger dashboard opens, you are taken to a page where you can rearrange the elements of the blog and add new gadgets.  This is how you would add such things as a search box, a Followers gadget, an Archives menu, other gadgets from websites, a custom HTML widget you've created from an image, or anything else that you want to display on your page, particularly on the header and sidebars.  The design page is very handy.  I'm thinking that most of you probably already know about the design page, but I had to hit on it just in case anyone was still in the dark about this cool feature.

Before I leave this discussion of Blogger, I wanted to talk a bit about the post editor.  I'm sure that, if you have a blog, you are already doing just fine with publishing posts, but I did want to draw your attention to some extra cool, little-known features of the post editor.  Below is an image of the post editor with the buttons I'm mentioning circled and labeled.  Please see the text after the image to read about each circled button!

First off, the Link button.  If you go to New Post on your Blogger Dashboard, you should see a button at the top of the toolbar that simply says "Link."  This is probably my favorite thing about the post editor.  If you highlight any piece text in your post, you can then click "Link" and a box will come up that allows you to link that text to a website.  I use this feature in almost every post.  It's great!

Another feature I really like and that I think is very under-appreciated is the Quote button.  Did you even know this existed?  When I discovered it, I decided that it was really neat.  The button is the third one from the end of the toolbar, and it has two quotation marks as the icon.  If you want something quoted, either because it's a quote, or because you just want to draw special attention to it, you can highlight that text and click the quote button.

It will make your text stand out from the rest of the post in a really neat way.  Depending on what template you're using, your quotes will look different, but with mine, the quote button produces this nice tan box and automatically italicizes my text.  Fun stuff!

One other handy feature that I actually don't use as much as I should is the Remove Formatting button.  If you mess something up with the formatting of your post, such as italicizing or emboldening something you didn't want to, you can highlight the messed up text and click the second to last button on the toolbar to return it to its original state.  This one is something that will really come in handy for me!

I hope you are inspired to try out some new stuff with your blog, and I hope my little ramblings are helpful to some of you!  I will try to keep this series going in the future and tell you about more parts of my blogging journey.  Some other topics you can look forward to would be: templates, HTML, and tutorial websites.