Web Sites Do-It-Yourself for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Designing a Blog

• Starting a blog with WordPress.com

• Customizing your blog template to match your content

• Writing and styling posts with panache

It was only a few years ago that blogs (short for Web log) were considered the wild and crazy new kid on the block. Next thing, it seemed like everyone had a blog. And most people didn't seem to know why they had a blog — they just knew that everyone was saying that you had to have one.

After a few introductory posts to play with this new toy, statistics from the blog search engine Technorati show that about 95 percent of people abandoned them. And that's a shame because blogging tools can be used for so much more than some lonely 14-year-old's gushing paean to sparkly vampires or a basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist warning about alien mind-control rays. Savvy technology shoppers read blogs like Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com) and Engadget (www.engagdget.com) to figure out if the newest techno-toy lives up to the hype. Dooce (http://dooce.com) and Suburban Turmoil (http://suburbanturmoil.blogspot.com) write about motherhood and child-rearing issues in a laugh-out-loud voice. Deadspin (http://deadspin.com) and Total Pro Sports (www.totalprosports.com/blog) cover the stories behind the stories on the sports page.

At its heart, blogging software allows you to post information to the Web in a quick and easy way. After you have the blog ...