Creating your own blog using Google Blogger

If you’re reading this I’ll assume that you want to start your own blog. And why wouldn’t you? Blogs are empowering. A blog allows you to reach out and connect with a vast potential audience or, if you prefer, a small intimate one...

The sole purpose of The Beginner’s Blogging Guide is to allow me to share everything that I learn about blog design with you.

The prime directive of any blog is to clearly and concisely convey the blog author’s message to an audience.

You can accomplish this is by creating a well designed, user-friendly blog that showcases your content in its best light.

And by this I don’t mean that your blog should look boring or conservative. As long as you follow a couple of key stylistic principles your blog can look…well…however you want it to look.

From the get-go I’d like to state that I’ll be focussing exclusively on Google’s Blogger service but please be aware that there are other excellent blog publishing tools available; like Wordpress for example.

Setup a Blogger account

Using Google’s Blogger and Page Creator services it’s possible to create and host an extremely sophisticated blog without incurring any web design or web hosting costs.

Ok, let’s get started.

Create a blog

Go to the Blogger site and click the “Create your blog now” link.

Once you create a Google account you can use the same login details for all of your Google services (if you already have a Google account enter your details now). Later on we will also be using Google’s Page Creator and Feedburner services.

The next step is to give your blog a title. This is very important because you are essentially creating the branding for your blog.

Your blog's name is very important!

Give your blog a name

When naming a blog you want to achieve two things:

1) You want to give people an inkling of what your blog is about.
2) You want to create a memorable name that stands out from the crowd.

Ideally your blog’s title will accomplish both of these goals.

Create a blog address

After you’ve selected your title you’ll need to pick a blog address (which will become the URL of your blog). The blog address is also extremely important and should be identical to, or at the very least, similar to your blog’s title.

So if you named your blog “Life, the Universe and Everything” you should make your blog address “lifetheuniverseandeverything.blogspot.com.” Just bear in mind that many blog names and addresses will have already been taken so you may have to exercise a little creativity and imagination to come up with something catchy.

Now enter the word verification text and hit the “Continue” arrow.

Choose the "Minima" template

Choose the “Minima” blog template

You’ll now find yourself in the blog template page. Select the “Minima” template and click the “Continue” arrow.

That’s it – you have laid the foundations of your first blog!

Many people are happy to stick with unmodified Blogger templates but with a little extra effort it’s possible to design a truly unique blog by customising the template and creating some artwork of your own.

In my next article I'll show you how to "Convert your Blogger Minima template to a 3 column layout."