Servage Magazine

So, you want to have your own blog? There are many ways to accomplish that, and lots of tools out there to help you. I would like to present WordPress to you, which is one of the most popular, and probably one of the best, blog applications available today. WordPress can be installed on your Servage account with just a few clicks in the Autoinstaller, whereafter it is easy to further customize your blog with your own theme, plugins/addons etc. So if you want an own blog today, read on.

Installing WordPress

1. Login to the Servage control panel and go to “Tools > Autoinstaller”.
2. Choose WordPress blog, and follow the instructions of the Autoinstaller.
3. Please remember to write down your WordPress login details, that are presented on the last screen of the Autoinstaller.

Using a custom theme

You can create your own theme (design) or use one of the many themes available online. For this example I have choose the template Arclite (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/arclite). If you want a specific template for your blog, you can most likely find something among the thousands of templates on the net.

1. Upload the template to the folder /wp-conten/themes in your WordPress directory on your Servage account.
2. Login to your WordPress administration interface (the URL and login data was given to you in the last step of the Autoinstaller).
3. Go to “Appearance > Themes” in the menu bar and select to activate your custom theme.

Using plugins/add-ons

There are numerous plugins for WordPress. Plugin/add-ons allow you to add/change the standard functionality of WordPress to whatever fits your needs. Browsing the Internet you will find that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins available, for statistics, comments, ratings, weather, polls, or whatever your mind can think of… Fortunately most of these plugins can be found and directly installed via the WordPress administration interface. Go to “Plugins > Add plugin” to do so.

Writing your blog entries

WordPress offers a very slick and nice interface for writing and managing your blog entries. You do no only have a nice versioning system for your text, but also a media manager (for images etc.) and the option to categorized your entries by categories and tags. And of course, for good interaction with your readers, you can allow comments to your content as well. If you are using Facebook or Twitter, you might even want to look into plugins that can send updates about your blog to those networks. Due to the generous plugin architecture of WordPress, you really have a lot of options to extend your blog to become exactly what you want it to be.