Why Blogging?
First of all, in making a post useful for others, I should summarize the topic emphasizing the main concepts. In today’s connected world, where so much information is available, I try to keep our posts easy to understand, and doing so requires me to have a firm grasp on the topic. This helps me to analyze and better keep track of my decisions. So it is win-win situation. When I write a post, questions arise, and answering them improves my understanding and requires that I take an extra look at what we do. Readers’ comments can also shed light on aspects of our decisions that we probably have not paid much attention to. For example, writing about the next potential stock purchase will make me analyse the stock even better and document it in a post. That others will read the post means the information must be clearly presented and easy to understand.
Because I have never done it before, blogging represents a chance to learn something new and exciting. Blogging also opens doors to a much wider audience than our circle of friends, considering that not all of our friends are interested in finance.
One of the first questions we asked ourselves was this: What platform should we choose for blogging?
Selecting a Blog Platform
My first choice was Joomla because it was supported on my network attached storage (NAS) out of the box. As I explored hosting options a bit more, I found that Joomla would cost more than WordPress. Other aspects, such as user friendliness and the percentage of existing blogs made with WordPress, also pointed to WordPress. My favorite blogs were built on WordPress’s platform so my final decision was to go with Word Press. Typing the content of this blog, I understand that it was right choice.
The other question was this: how to make my blog appealing, fast, and responsive?
Customization
After buying a domain and hosting at Blue host, I started exploring WordPress. Playing around with the platform, I quickly realized that blog theme is responsible for the site’s look and organization. The default WordPress themes that came with installation are a good start, but if you want more exiting features, it’s worth buying a theme. In any case doing so is cheaper than looking for a Web designer’s help.
I choose the theme Schema from MyThemeShop because of positive reviews that described it as loading very fast and being SEO friendly and fully responsive. I quickly realized that light customization was still required and that I needed to modify some internal scheme files. Thanks to the theme forum, it was easy to find answers to my questions. Schema has three menus at the top of the site but I wanted to use only one menu, and it was tricky to enable only one. The solution was to add an empty menu. Displaying featured images (images that represent a post and appear on the home page)required modifying a single .php file.
Another theme option is an image slider (changing images at the top of home page); getting this to work properly also required editing the theme file manually. Like other hosting services, my Blue-host administrative account provides an easy Web interface file manger so I can edit any blog files as well as an option to backup your blog files. I recommend regularly backing up your blog files, especially prior to editing them.
Because this blog is about our finance journey, I’ve added some tables with financial data. After trying the default WordPress table plug-in, I bought the wpDataTables plug-in , primarily because it allows for better presentation of data in tables. The plug-in also provides graph presentations, which I plan to use in the future.
Using featured images on a blog makes the blog more appealing, and eye popping images make it even better. This is why I bought images for my blog.
Because this blog is about finance, the next question is this: How much did it cost to launch this blog?
Blog Price
Domain and hosting: 196.79 CAD annually
- Basic Web hosting for three years: 36 * $3.95 (monthly) = $142.2 = 196.79 CAD
- Domain name registration: $11.99 – no payment for new customers
Schema theme: $59 = 81.74 CAD (one time)
wpDataTables plug-in: $37 = 51.19 CAD
Blog images: 41 CAD
Total price paid: 370.72 CAD
