What is the best way to set up a good-looking blog without doing a lot of technical web stuff?

I want to start a blog. I don't want to go through the technical web stuff. But I do want to have as much control over it as possible and have it look as respectable as possible.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. E

 

Install Wordpress through your hosting in 5 minutes. It's easy and takes no technical skill at all. Then grab a nice looking theme from any freebie theme site and upload it to your hosting and activate that in 10 seconds.

You can have a nice looking blog up and running in an hour, literally. Of course, adding good content to it can take awhile, but that's for the next day

 

asmodeus is right. Wordpress is easy and what I am using in my blogs.

 

+1 for WordPress and its ease of use, definitely the best you can find for blogs. One side note tho - indeed you can find tons of free themes all around the web, but adding just ANY theme you fancy might not be the best idea. Some free themes are badly coded so if you decide to make some basic modifications to them in the future, it might not work. Even worse - some free themes are already bugged with malware code and this can pose a serious security threat down the line. I would either go with a free theme from some of the biggest and most respectable sites, or simply pay a little sum to buy one. There are great themes that are not that expensive, its just a matter of research

 

As a blogger, you are basically going to be adding text to a relatively static website. The dynamic piece will be what you write in the blog. You can get a fancy, customized website done in the DP marketplace for a small amount of money (I know, because I have done just that before) and be off and running with little need to delve into the technical stuff. Better to focus on your writing, anyway. I have seen too many non-technical types think that they are saving money or moving ahead more quickly only to get lost in the weeds of programming issues and end up buying a website anyway because they find themselves wasting time and effort on things outside of their expertise.

 

I would install Wordpress and get a great theme from Themeforest. Its extremely simple to set up and you could have a great looking site set up within 15 minutes if you're efficient at it.

 

Just start with installing WordPress, and follow your heart.

 

Definitely go with Wordpress. I've tried Wordpress with Blue Host and Dream Host, and I find that the latter has served me better.

On top of that, learn some basic html as well, it'll come in handy!
Some wordpress themes offer amazing page builders which are great for beginners; with the exception of knowing some basic html.
So you can leverage on this to create professional looking pages and customize your blog posts.

It's really quite simple to learn, and you don't even have to memorize the codes.
You can do a google search on html guides, here's one to get you started:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/

Hope this helps

 

As most have said go with wordpress and for the theme I like theme-junkie. with theme junkie you get access to all of their 42 themes for $39.00 (price will go up on August 1st to $49.00) The themes are easy to use and they all basically use the same framework so once you have used one and learned how it works the others fall into place easily

al

 

As a blogger, Wordpress (Content Management System) is your preferred choice. You have access to a suite of good-looking free themes (style) and you can easily add blog posts with its simple interface.

After you have monetized your blog, you can look at paid themes with more sophisticated designs.

Let me know if you need any wordpress-related help.

 

WordPress is the best platform for the bloggers and it will keep getting better with time. As a blogger, all you have to do is sign up for a WordPress based hosting package or start a free blog on the WordPress platform. WordPress provides with a wide range of themes, plugins and extensions for making your blog impressive and efficient.

 

Additionally to the native capability of being able to change themes, use various plugins for extra functions, features, tables, all sorts of things, you can even further customize wordpress themes with the help of oursourced coders. Something to keep in mind with plugins; Adding too many can slow down the loading time for your site, and you really want to avoid that as much as possible, some plugins like 'Jetpack' have some functions to help improve loading speed. Additionally, it's good to know that you may run into some bugs when adding plugins and such, so you can always try to remove it and see if it was the cause of a problem.

I myself, have found that down the line, using outsourced coders to further improve, spruce up, sharpen or add to my wordpress themes was the way to go. I often start with pre-made themes I purchase on themeforest.com or other similar markets, and if my website does well, I eventually hire a coder to make it look better, run faster and sometimes customize it to specific needs.

Hope this helps!

 

Take a look at http://www.weebly.com/

 

Do you have a blog platform already, what niche would you like to write your blog most of the time?