Was it easy?

A year ago, we published our first post. Today I’d like to shed some light on how easy or NOT it was to start a blog.

The idea of a blog had been brewing for some time before we actually jumped into the cold water. There were a few of you suggesting we do this: some sent us “how to” links. We also read quite a few of those “How to”s , or articles like “6 easy steps to start a blog”, “How to create a blog in 20 min…” Twenty minutes??!! Really? Whoever you are, perhaps you are targeting geniuses, but 20 minutes? You can’t download the software in that time, even if all the rest is well defined and set up.

Before I continue, I want to caution all out there reading the catchy lines above. It is neither as easy, nor as simple, as they suggest. Shall I repeat it is NOT EASY! Some of you know that I am a former IT project and product manager who spend many years in web development and content management. So, the terminology and concepts are well known to me. Alex is pretty technical too. Yet it took us some time to put all the pieces together.

Back to the “How to…” posts. They all go somewhat like this:

1. Choose a name (OK, this one is obvious, isn’t it?)
2. Register a domain
3. Choose a host
4. Choose and install a blogging platform
5. Publish your first post

There may be a few more steps thrown in, depending which blogging and hosting platform they are trying to sell. But the emphasis is on sell! Yes, they all want you to click on the link to the recommended provider and buy it through them. Nothing wrong with the latter, however the tone of voice is misleading. It is not that simple or easy as it sounds!

So how easy it is? If any of the terms above give you headache it won’t be like one, two, three… You will learn, but it will take time and effort, lots of effort.

You can of course start with much simpler blogging platform, like Blogger or even the free version of WordPress. Choose the default theme and off you go. But pretty soon your blog content will be difficult to find and all-in-all it won’t look good. Better spend some time learning the ropes.

I had the design of the website, I knew how it would look, or so to say I had my requirements. We didn’t want to spend much money, but on the other hand we wanted our own domain name (AroundOurETable, that is – and it took quite a while to find an available domain name that met my requirements: this wasn’t my first, or even fifth choice). So we chose our content management and host providers and registered the domain name. This was in April 2018. According to the experts, we were now only minutes from publishing our first post. Then I spent sometime researching the free themes (think about your cookie cutters – themes implement selected available platform functionality, provide colours, fonts and layouts and other capabilities) that came with WordPress, our chosen content management system. Realising that it would take some time to find one closer to my requirements, I shelved the blog for better times and off we went travelling for two months. I have to say that if we hadn’t already paid for the hosting platform and domain name, no matter how little it was, we would have thrown out the entire idea of blogging at this point. We wanted a simple way to communicate with friends and family, and this was looking like more trouble than it was worth.

But since the subscription clock was ticking, sometime in July 2018 we decided to give it a try. I chose a theme that covered most of my requirements, but far from all I wanted. After some trial and error, I had the layout. And finally, in August last year we launched the site. But it wasn’t smooth sailing. We wanted to post photos, and a lot of them. The galleries in our selected theme did not work, and we spent too much time trying. Perhaps they’d work in the fully-fledged paid version. With some more research we found a plug-in that for now handles our galleries, and even that is sometimes flaky.

After the learning curve at the beginning, all pretty much settled down. Yet with so many pieces involved, sometimes things don’t work. Like the recent episode with images not loading. It happened after a WordPress version update. Luckily, the small amount we paid included tech support and the response of the support team was great. Eventually they found and resolved the problem.

And looking through the site I can’t believe that in a year we have created 117 posts and 10 pages. We have uploaded 1,635 images in the media library (these are the images you see in the text of the blog). We also have 69 galleries with 3094 photos in total. These are the photos at the end of our travel posts.

We even have 6 videos that Alex created.

Did it become a full-time job? No! This blog is just a hobby and we post when we feel like it and so far it’s been rather frequent. We still have quite a few posts to fill the gaps from our RTW trip, then we have a few unfinished stories from 2018 and 2017 waiting. In the meanwhile, I am planning our next travel adventure. Where will we go? Any suggestions?