These instructions are meant to be platform independent however this tutorial is geared towards setting up a Joomla blog because this is what I use but most of the rules will apply to different blogging platforms.

You have to consider what your blog is going to be about before starting anything. What is your niche? What are you going to write articles about? It is always good to write about something you are passionate about and even better if you are a professional in that field. It could be you are just a hobbyist and want to share you experience.

You should write a blog because you want to, not because you want to make money. The reasons for this are 2 fold, you won’t make money straight away and if you are writing it from the point of view of just making money your blog will most likely have low value articles because you don’t care that much.

Do not rush setting your blog up, but do not be afraid to try things out.

Step 1 – Select your niche

What is your blog about, don’t try and write about everything and making sure your blog has some direction. This will allow you to put the occasional rant or general article in it if setup right.

Step 2 – Brainstorm Categories and Tags

This is important for setting up your blog. You need enough categories to put all your stuff into but not too many so that they become overwhelming,  I think 10 is probably enough.

But what happens if you need more than 10. You can have more than 10 if you really need to, but this is where tags come in.

Tags are simliar to categories except they do not have a hierarchy and are used for categorisation rather than display. Generally articles can only belong to one category but have many tags. They can be used like mini categories, see the example below:

• Category: Online
• Tags: Prestashop, Joomla, SEO, html, CSS

So all of these different types of article can go in the online category even if they are just about Prestashop. You should note that if one of the large portions of your writing is about Prestashop you should give it its own category.

These need to be nailed down before going any further. The way I would do this is write down every category you possibly want and then see if you can fit them in to 10 parent categories, this will give you your tags and categories.

Example Categories and Tags Brainstorm

This is my category brainstorm for my blog. Think of all the categories your articles could fit into, and then reduce the main categories to about 10 and the rest could be tags.

• You can also research other blogs in your niche and see what they use.
• Do one large list and then arrange it like below so you can see your categories and tags emerge.
• Tags can be present in more than 1 category.
• Some systems allow articles to be present in more than 1 category. I would avoid this unless really necessary.
• It is recommend no more than 10 categories. Use tags for extended grouping.

• News
  • Tech news
  • Security news
• General / Misc
  • offers
  • Rants
  • Reviews
• Security
  • Malware
  • Virus
  • Mobile
  • General
  • Web
  • personal
• Web / Online
  • Prestashop
  • hosting
  • Joomla
  • Blogging
  • SEO
  • Online TV / Streaming services
• Electronics
  • Soldering
  • BGA
  • Reflowing
  • Jtag
  • diagnostics
• Software
  • free software
  • software reviews
• Hardware?
  • Printers
  • Hard drives
  • monitors
• Technology
  • Android
  • Hardware
  • Mobile
  • Mac OS
• PC repairs / Computer Repairs?
  • Hardware
  • software
  • Windows
• Programming
  • PHP
  • Java
  • Code snippets
  • MySQL
  • .htaccess
• Computer Repairs
  • Useful tools
  • Malware software
  • Techniques
  • Solutions of note – how to fix a 0x80008 error
• Other Category Ideas
  • Android software
  • Misc
  • Musings
  • General
  • Other

To finish this exercise and to make sure you have the right categories for your blog:

1. Write a description for each of the categories (you will need these later anyway) and see how you feel.
2. Write a couple of article titles and see how they fit, or better yet, use the titles of articles you already have or are thinking about writing

Step 3 – Brainstorm Articles

You do not need to write the articles now but I am guessing if you have not written them you know what you want to write about.

What I would do here is brainstorm all the ideas you have in your head for articles and write them down in a big list, this mean you can come back to them later without them rattling about in your head.

Step 4 – Select the look and feel of your blog

This speaks for itself you need to go and find a Joomla template you like the look of and don’t be shy for paying for one. They are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, but there are loads of really good free ones.

• Make sure you get a template that is mobile responsive.
• Do not use dodgy templates i.e. Ones downloaded from pirate sites. They will most likely have viruses in that you cannot see.

Step 5 – Select a good domain name

Now you have some content and have direction for the site in your head, you need to decide what to call it. Follow some of the guidelines below for selecting:

• Spend a good amount of time on this.
• Don’t have a name that is too long.
• Make sure it is easy to spell and say.
• English words are better (wider audience).
• Consider relevant keywords in your domain.
• If your blog is a general blog make your domain name non-specific (i.e. buildinghouses.com is specific to building houses and would be no good for electronics.).
• .com is preferably, but some articles say you get indexed easier in your country by using a country specific suffice (egg .co.uk).

I have used 123-reg.co.uk in the past for domains. They are not the cheapest but their system is really easy to use. They also have an excellent domain name checker.

Step 6 – Setup Hosting

This is a must for obvious reasons. There are many different solutions which can fall in to 3 groups

1. Free
2. Cheap
3. Commercial

There is an adage that you get what you pay for, this is very true but when you are starting off because you do not need to buy a dedicated server costing $50 a month just to server 5 pages.

Always use a hosting service that uses the cPanel setup. This make your life much easier in maintaining your sites backend (databases, emails, crons etc...)

Free

The free services can be problematic and very restrictive and if a blog is going to be a main part of you probably don’t want to start with this.

Cheap

These services are not bad for the money but the support is not usually that good. Most of the cheap services such as hostgator/hostmonster/justhost/bluehost have all been bought up by one company, EIG.

I would probably use Justhost for this option. I have used them in the past and they are ok.

Commercial

These can vary heavily in price and level of support. It is definitely worth shopping around here. I would not go for a dedicated server or any of that, if you need one of those you don’t need to be reading this blog post as you already know everything. I would stick with a base level shared server hosting package with a good level of bandwidth and storage, usually with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage but not always. You will find it better to get a data center based in the country you are living in for quicker load times. If there is nothing for a good price, US based services are always a good alternative.

Some good services do restrict the service they give you like bandwidth and storage so their servers do not get overloaded making sure your site is always on (99.99%). If you only every use 200mb storage, do you need unlimited storage?

I use hostdime for my websites and bought their reseller package. Their support is second to none. I am always impressed with the quickness and the quality of their answers. You can contact them by phone, live chat or ticket system

Tips:

• When you have a real tricky issue it is always better to type it out and submit a ticket because the technicians that deal with the tickets have more time and less pressure to deal with them than on live chats.
• If a live chat gets tricky the tchnician will create a ticket for you anyway.
• Live chat is useful when you do not know what to ask for.

Step 7 - www or non-www

This is a very important selection because www.quantumwarp.com and quantumwarp.com as far as google is concerned they are two different websites and over time having links pointing to both of them will affect your ranking.

So which do I choose?

• Blogs tend not to have the www.
• Blogs should all be non-www (it is 2014, people know what a website is)
• Corporate websites should all be www.

NB: Make sure that you setup a 301 redirect from the www to the non-www version of your website or vice versa so that there becomes only 1 website.

Step 8 - http or https

You absolutely need this nowadays. https allows secured connections to your website. Google and other search engines recogise this a positive factor so this will also help you SEO rankings.

You can get a cheap SSL certificate and install that yourself but as we speak more and more companies are automatically providing SSL certificates via the LetsEncrypt service with webhosting packages.

NB: Google and other search engines also recognise websites on http and https as different sites so make sure that you setup a 301 redirect from the http to https version of your website if both are exposed so that there becomes only 1 website.

Step 9 – Other things on your site and Blog Location

You know that your website is going to have a blog on it because that is the whole point for this article but you should now consider whether you want other services or features on it such as:

• Knowledge Base
• Tools
• Custom Searches
• Forum

Laying out a website is quite important and there are a few distinct options we can choose from. Select from the following list what you want your website to be:

• Blog (in the website root) Only
  
  • https://quantumwarp.com/
  • This is a very straight forward way of setting a blog up.
• Blog (in the website root) with other stuff present on the website 
  
  • https://quantumwarp.com/
  • This can be done but it could get a bit messy down the line when you try and figure out where to put stuff.
• Blog (in sub-folder) with other stuff present on the website
  • https://quantumwarp.com/blog/ or https://quantumwarp.com/news/
  • If you are going to have more on your website than a blog, then this is the prefered option.
  • This silos the blog and stops it getting in the way of any other features/services you want to install or use on your website now or later.
  • Easier to expand your website.

If you choose either of the options to have you blog in the root then you can skip to the next step, but if your blog is going to be part of a larger website then you need to make a further choice below about what you call your Menu Item which also controls the URL slug. In a non-Joomla world you can just use a sub-folder for the same effect.

News or Blog

This is quite a common question so I have looked in to it and put my thoughts down below about when you should choose a to use menu item named Blog or News. This assumes you are putting your blog in a Menu Item/folder which you decided on above.

News

https://quantumwarp.com/news/

Choose 'News' if your website is:

• Corporate
• Faceless
• Big Company
• Articles not really written from the heart by one guy
• The articles are more information giving than personal articles (i.e. we now sell 3.5 inch chrome brackets)
• Not updated that much
• Just informs about events
• Single topic, company news
• Sharing events and awards

Blog

https://quantumwarp.com/blog/

Choose 'Blog' if your website is:

• Small company (mostly)
• Personal messages
• Articles written by a passionate person who is personally invested in the company/product
• Articles are written by a human not scrapped from other sites
• Updated fairly regularly (I would say once a week)
• Gives some benefit to the reader other than selling goods
• Hobby site
• Personal site
• Social Club site