Choosing a Content Management System for Your Blog

You can read about step one which was all about choosing a domain name and host for your blog here: http://www.mikeslife.org/content/choosing-host-and-domain-name-your-blog
Having decided on Servage as my host, the next step was to decide on a CMS, or content management system. A CMS is a piece of software which manages the content of your site, without you having to code every single entry in HTML.
I researhed quite hard and discovered that the best two systems for blogs were Wordpress and Drupal.
Wordpress has the advantage that it is specifically for blogs, whereas Drupal is a more general product and can be used in several applications. Both are open source and free to download, which is wonderful! In fact, both come preinstalled with Servage and can be uploaded to your new site with one click! Although you can install either in your server via www.drupal.com or www.wordpress.com
There is a drawback to using this kind of open source software and it's that the programs and additional "modules" or "widgets" are written by computer geeks for computer geeks, so often the explanations you find on a web search as to how things work or how to install them can seem a little intimidating. But keep searching and you'll find some easy answers which you will understand in time. Many bloggers now upload video to show you how to do these things, which is so helpful to newbies like me.
After a lot of thought, I eventually seleted Drupal. It was as much a gut feeling as anything else, I suspected that it would offer me more scope for customisation, although I won't know if I was right until I try a Wordpress site one day.
I clicked the Servage autoinstaller and my site was up and running within minutes! What had happened was that Drupal was now installed on my Apache server, and it had created both a MYSQL database, which would store all the actual site data and also a frontpage I could access with my new log in and customise to my heart's desire.
www.mikeslife.org was up and running!
In the next post in this series I will cover the initial set up of the site, the changes I made, and the additional "Modules" I added to make it suit what I was looking for. I bet you can't wait to hear all about "Clean URL's!"