Technophobe Starts a Blog: From Zero to Launch

How a technically challenged sexagenarian managed to start a professional looking blog.

I’d been thinking for a long while about maybe starting a blog. The problem was that while I really wanted to write the posts, I had absolutely no idea how to set up and manage a website. Surely this was far too technical for an old girl like me. The idea persisted though, and I decided that I would challenge myself to make it happen. Since you’re reading this on my site you know that I did do it, and do you know what? It wasn’t that hard!

Now that I’ve got my site up and running it occurred to me that there might be other technophobes out there who might like to know how I managed to do it and most importantly, the key resources I used. So, this is what I did: –

The first thing I noticed when I started reading the ‘How To’ blog posts and watching the ‘Start a Blog’ YouTube videos, was just how much information is out there and how contradictory it can be. The basics get mixed up with the ‘how to drive traffic’, ‘how to rank on Google’, ‘how to leverage social media’ and ‘how to monetize your site’. Everybody had a different angle, and I found it totally confusing. 

So, I stepped back, and decided a few things:–

1. I was going to launch a minimum viable blog. Just the basics.
2. It had to look professional and reflect me.
3. I wanted it up and running in 4 weeks.
4. I was not going to worry about an email strategy, social media or monetization at this stage.
5. I would commit to publishing 2 posts a week for 6 weeks and then review where I wanted to go from there.

So, when I cut through the noise, I found that I needed only these few key resources:

Key Resources

• 1 comprehensive and detailed ‘How To’ blog post –Ryan Robinson, How to Start a Blog in 2023
• 1 Theme designer and installer – 17th Avenue Designs
• 2 free stock photo sites – Unsplash and Pexels
• 1 Book – WordPress for Beginners 2023: A Visual Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering WordPress by Dr. Andy Williams.

And that’s it! Everything else, at his stage, was surplus to requirements.

These are the steps I went through to get from zero to launch in 4 weeks. 

Step 1: Research

I read many ‘How To’ blog posts and watched lots of YouTube videos before deciding on what I thought was the best one for me. That was Ryan Robinson’s How to Start a Blog in 2023. It assumes little technical knowledge, is detailed and clear and progresses through logical stages.

Steps 1-4 focus on just getting the site up and running with a Minimum Viable Blog. Steps 5-6 will be for later.

I also signed up to Ryan’s 7 day email tutorial which is a freebie if you sign up to his email. You don’t necessarily need this, but getting the emails in my inbox each day kept me motivated and tied in with my ‘one-step-at-a-time’ idea.

Step 2: Niche and Domain Name

Following Ryan’s advice, I decided on my blogging niche and chose a domain name.

Step 3: Hosting and Domain Registration

I signed up with Bluehost hosting and registered my domain name. Again, Ryan’s instructions on this are really clear and it took about 10 minutes. I chose the Choice Plus option because of the additional security features.

Step 4: Theme

The next thing to do was to pick a theme for my blog and I found this was one of the hardest things. There is just so much choice! The aesthetic feel of the blog was really important to me. I knew I wanted something simple; a mainly white background and a slightly feminine feel, but what was the best option?

One of the “How To’ bloggers that I had looked at in my research phase was bysophielee.com. Sophie had recommended a theme designer called 17^th Avenue Designs who specialised in feminine WordPress themes.  I looked at their site and liked what I saw. Even better, they would install my chosen theme on my website for a reasonable fixed fee 

Because I was so unsure of my ability to actually set the theme up myself, and worried that I might get stuck at this point and give up, I was willing to pay what I considered to be a reasonable amount to take that risk away. If that’s beyond your budget however, the 17^th Avenue’s reviews say that it’s really easy to set up yourself with the clear and comprehensive instructions supplied.

So, I chose and paid for a theme and installation on the website. Three days later I received an email to tell me that the installation was complete, together with a link to the theme’s Post Installation Guide.

My website was installed but filled with demo content. Now I had to give it my own look and feel, do all the WordPress housekeeping, and produce some content.

Step 5: Theme Customisation

I worked through the Post Installation guide, tweaking, adding, and deleting as instructed, so that the blog looked the way I wanted it to. The instructions for this were really clear and easy to follow. 17^th Avenue also have a whole library of ‘how to’ instructions specific to each particular theme on their site, together with a really good WordPress video library.

Step 6: WordPress ‘Housekeeping’

Once the theme is fully set up you still need to do some WordPress housekeeping to get if fully operational.  The key resource I found for this is a brilliant visual step-by-step guide to WordPress recommended by Ryan Robinson and many others. 

WordPress for Beginners 2023 by Dr. Andy Williams.

I cannot express how brilliant this book is for someone like me who’s completely clueless. It assumes no previous knowledge and walks you step by step through the whole process of things you need to consider when setting up your site. If you know absolutely nothing about WordPress but want to set up a website, this is the book for you and the only one you will need. 

Step 7: Content and Images

The last step was to produce some content and give the site my own look and feel. To do this I needed to find the right sort of images. Thanks again to Ryan, I discovered Unsplash and Pexels, where you can get beautiful free images. It’s really fun to put in a search word and see all of the amazing options.

I decided that I wanted to have 4 pieces of content on the site before I took the “Coming Soon’ page down so that’s what I produced.

Step 8: Website live. 

Yay! Now I’m just going to keep posting twice a week for six weeks and see where it goes.

All of the above took me about four weeks. I wasn’t rushing it, just feeling my way but I’m now really happy to have accomplished something that I didn’t think I could. There are still many things I still have to get my head around like email lists, SEO, content strategy, Google analytics, affiliate programs, but hey, that is all for later…

I hope this was useful, Sian.

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