Best tools to build a simple blog/personal site?

General Discussion
1

Hello, GD.

Need some advice. I want to start a website- nothing fancy at all, just a blog with a few different tabs to keep things seperated. Decent pagination and maybe some images.

I’ve produced sites before, mainly commercial ones for video games. But this is just a personal one, and I don’t want to spend any money (deally) on it.

Now I’ve looked at the obvious options- blogspot, wordpress, and they look OK. The thing is I want to know that, if in the unlikely event that people actually liked reading my shit I could put up some ads and what not and make me some monies. Am I right in thinking that with a wordpress blog you can’t ever get any money or control on the ads and stuff?

I could look at other hosts, pay for my own URL or whatever, but then I’d have to look at how to produce the site. So any advice is welcome. Like I say I’ve handled projects for big sites so I am fairly literate with this stuff- I’ve just never made a personal site that didn’t have money and a team behind it, ironically enough.

Thanks!

2

As a webdesigner I prefer to use wordpress for all my clients sites. It just makes life easier in the long run. I’ve never put a site up on wordpress.com itself so I have no idea what restrictions they have. But if you have your own domain you are free to put up ads.

Only piece of advice I would give you is make sure you have some sort of subscription offer on your site that will allow you to collect visitor’s email addresses, if you really want to earn money this list of emails will become extremely valuable.

3

Ah, thanks! So download the wordpress kit, build the site (looks easy enough), upload it to a domain. Right? And make sure they can subscribe so I get a nicevlist of emails to flog to marketeers.

4

Yeh, hardest thing is setting up a database and getting all the details wordpress needs to access it, after that it’s very straight forward

If you need hosting I run my own server - registernewdomain.org