I started off with Blogger. In fact, I still use Blogger for my Simply Aesthetic Blog. It's fast, it's free, and you just need a Gmail account to get started. Best part is, it's pretty intuitive, so even a technophobe can set one up in minutes. The template choices are pretty limited, but it's no big deal. Modifying the overall look is easy, with adding elements and rearranging them at a click of a button.

And then there's Wordpress. Also has a free version, but I really don't think there's any advantage over Blogger, and the latter is much easier to use. The "paid" version takes a lot more to get used to it. When I first played with Wordpress 3 years ago, I hated it! BVut now that all my sites are built with Wordpress as the engine, I've comne round to the many advantages, particularly how much Google loves it.

I think this is the type of blog Julie wants. So here's how to go about it!

Step 1: Buy a domain name

The domain name is what people type into the browser to look for your site. It needs to reflect you or your interest if it's a personal blog. Most people choose their names as the domain name of choice. I used to own christinecheng.com. But when I gave it up, it was quickly taken up by another Christine Cheng. So I had to settle for drchristinecheng.com.

For Julie, julielee.com is already taken. Actually some domain name traders have taken it, in hope someone by the name of Julie Lee would buy it off them for a pricely sum. For her, an option would be to try julie-lee.com or julielee.me. The .me TLDs are for personal websites.

My favourite domain name supplier is Godaddy.com. I've used the for years. A .com name costs US$10.69 per year. Namecheap is slightly cheaper (by about US$1), but I find their site less user friendly. Now I will buy my GoDaddy domain names by accessing their site through Dubli's Shopping Portal, and I get a 10% rebate.

Some hosts will provide a domain name for free as part of the hosting package, so I'd just use GoDaddy to source for an available name first.

Step 2: Buy A Hosting Package

The host stores the content of your blog. Hosting used to be very expensive, with limits on data stored, bandwidth transfers, etc. Now it's so cheap that you can even find hosting for US$10 for an entire year!

I've tried a few, but my favourite is Apthost.com. I think they give a free domain name too, but I had already purchased my domain name, so didn't take up their offer. I like Apthost as the server speed is good, minimal downtime, and setting up Wordpress is a cinch!

Step 3: Configuring It All

Once the host has sent you the welcome e-mail with nameserver & access details, it's time to go back to the Domain Name trader to manage your domain name. All you have to do here is set your nameservers to the ones in the host e-mail. The pointing may take some time to be established. Patience is needed at this time.

Then go to yourdomain.com/cpanel and login with the details given in the host e-mail. Cpanel is quite confusing for a newbie. Full of icons! The one you need to look for is a smiley face labelled Fantastico Deluxe. Click on that and it takes you to an installation page. On the left side, thre's a column of numerous applications it can auto install. Look for Wordpress. Click on that & fill in the options. The only ones that matter are e-mail (choose your own rather than default), blog name and blog description. The just save and exit.

Step 4: Configuring Wordpress

If you go to www.yourdomain.com, you'll now see the default Wordpress template. Ugly blue thing. And a Hello World message. To change all this, you'll need to go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. This is the control centre of your blog. From there, you can add theme, search for a nice one and install. You have hundreds of free themes to choose from!

Then you can add in plugins and widgets to personalise your site.

After that, just add posts and blog away!

That's a very abbreviated version of how to set up a blog. Blogger's easier, right? I had so much help from Shi (my SEO coach, buddy of many years and Chef Trainer of Finggle.com) and Thomas, my web designer. Then attending a couple of courses and reading a huge book gave me essential "aha" moments. I'm no expert, but I can now set up a blog from scratch in a couple of hours. Being anal about aesthetics, choosing the right template is what takes longest. Then it's prety much a case of installing & activating my favourite plugins, and I'm done!

                  

For a relatively recent blog revamp, especially one with no major theme at all, I was quite surprised to see that over 600 visitors came in the last month. Half of them were referred by search engines.

Then it gets really interesting. Not just the search terms used to find the page, but how long the visitor stays and how many pages are visited.

Not surprisingly, some of the traffic was from people looking to find out more about me. So variations of Dr Christine Cheng and Simply Aesthetic. There was one search for Christine Cheng Plastic Surgery. Sorry, wrong website, me no Plastic Surgeon. Amazingly, there is another Dr Christine Cheng in the USA who is a Plastic Surgeon and I believe owns a medical spa too. Or maybe there are 2 stateside... Another was searching for before/after pictures of my work. Sorry lah, between patient confidentiality issues and MoH breathing down my neck regarding having any pictures at all on my website, there's no hope in hell of finding any of my aesthetic work online. You'll just have to come visit me!

Then many searches relating to lo hei phrases, Batam day trips, dermarollers, even one for massage for fat angmoh! And the best of the bunch? Someone trying to find out more about my husband! Hahaha! Put you out of your misery lah! I'm swinging single with no man in sight! ;o)

Oh well, I guess this little exercise hasn't really helped define any direction for this blog, other than being a collection of my ramblings when the mood strikes. Which, I guess, is what blogs started off as being about.

                  

When it sailed past the registration process (almost 200 sites) and started posting the spun articles, I was almost jumping for joy.

And then disaster struck. Suddenly we lost internet connectivity. I tried all the usual tricks with fiddling with the modem, to no avail. It was like 3 am at that time, and I was getting beside myself! Eventually, I gave up and went to sleep. Apologies to all who saw me on Thursday. I was not looking for feeling good!

I was particularly distressed to not know how successful the run was, as there was no report the next morning. I could have been up half the night for nothing...

So I decided to give EVO II a miss on Thursday night, and sleep early instead. Last night was out, so first chance to play again is this afternoon. It's been happily clicking away for the last 2 hours now. A full run normally takes 5 hours. But since I re-used a lot of the previous run's settings, it zipped through the accounts it failed to register at previously, and has started article submission already!

I think that I am falling in love with this bit of software. It really allows me to focus on keyword research and content building, which is what I love. My only gripe is the long process times. To start a run after I get home really interferes with my sleep. I could start a run before I go to work in the mornig, but that would mean sacrificing 15 minutes of sleep, and I ain't a morning person by any stretch of the imagination.

So EVO II will just have to work at night. And he needs his own bedroom, then I can sleep in peace!

                  

And I'm really into building websites at the moment. It's a hobby gone crazy, almost! And this hobby can drive me nuts sometimes, as Google doesn't seem to recognise my efforts by increasing my page rank value, no matter how hard I work on the actual site content.

This morning, I woke up to an interesting e-mail. They've managed to create a robot to do the task of link building faster than any human! It's efficient, doesn't complain, doesn't fall sick, doesn't resign and doesn't play punk! Hmmmm... won't it be wonderful to hire a bunch of these to help me in the clinic too! Haha!

Anyway, it was something I couldn't resist, so I whipped out the credit card again. Sigh, very, very expensive hobby I've got! And here's what I bought into:

I do get a 7-day free trial, so I'll be using it to see what happens with a few of the new sites I created, my Liposculpture site, in particular. I did pay for a few articles to lead to it last night, but they won't kick in for weeks yet. And I'm planning on revamping my Acne site today too. That one was purchased in the current condition, and it really sucks! My designer was tasked with revamping it months ago, but he went AWOL on me.

Suddenly, I love this new SEO robot even more!

                  

Those days, I was desperately trying out all kinds of web design software, hoping I could get one to work. It was an unmitigated disaster as my old laptop decided to crash and die in the middle of it all!

Eventually, I fell in love with Frontpage as it was virtually identical to Word. So the first few versions of the Simply Aesthetic website were built with Frontpage.

All was well till my friend Shi told me to try Wordpress. Now the original DrChristineCheng.com blog was built on Wordpress, and I found it a nightmare! But with his insistence, I found a designer to code my Wordpress templates and with that, I have become more and more comfortable with Wordpress in the last 9 months.

Last night, I was fiddling about with a normal html template for a new site I'm building about liposculpture. I edited it with Frontpage, then got irritated because there was no fixed elements between the pages. The home page looked great, but the other pages were really unprofessional.

Anyway, after sleeping on it, common sense prevailed & I decided to convert the entire site to Wordpress again. Thank God for free templates. I'd love to code my own, but can't do it for nus!

Do check out my new site: All About Liposculpture. Hope you find it informative.