TypePad® for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Creating Your First Blog

In This Chapter

• Determining your blog's settings

• Understanding your design choices

• Finding out who's visiting you and why

• Managing what you've already written

• Setting up your comment structure

Before you start writing posts, you need to set up your blog and make it as user-friendly (to you and your readers) as possible. Understanding and establishing your blog's basic settings on the front end saves you many headaches on the back end! In Chapter 4, we show you how to navigate your TypePad Dashboard using the green account-level bar. When you click the name of the blog you want to work on (from the Blogs link in your green account-level bar or the Dashboard's right sidebar), you see a blue blog-level navigation bar. In this chapter, we focus on the blue blog-level bar to get your blog set up and ready to share with the world.

Just as Chapter 4 gives you a road map of your green account-level bar, this chapter gives you a road map of your blue blog-level bar, explaining the purpose and function of every link and button. Some of these blog-level elements, we explain in full detail; still others contain enough features to require further explanation later in the book. But by the end of this chapter, you'll have a working knowledge of the blog-level bar, and you'll be ready to jump into writing posts in Chapter 6.

While you're still in the blog setup stage, use the steps in this chapter to set your blog's publicity options, configure your post and page options, ...