Business Information Systems

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.

In our course we are going to use WordPress for the creation of weblogs (commonly known as blogs). A blog is “a website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings“ – www.dictionary.com

Here is a small list of some blogs worth seeing:

• Elerner’s Blog on E-Learning
• Paul Krugman’s NY Times Blog
• Baseline Scenario Blog – news and remedies from the global financial crisis

We will use a service called WordPress.com which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress-based blog in a few minutes. It is less flexible than the WordPress you download and install yourself, but good enough for the start.

First, you need to register register by entering a username, a password and a valid email address.

Once you have created and activated your account, you can log in to see your personal homepage.

From here, WordPress offers many options to customize your blog and there are uncountable plugins for beautifying your pages.

Be adventurous and find out on your own what WordPress allows you to do or watch some of the following helpful online tutorials (some of them use old WordPress versions, but most features remain unchanged in the version you are going to use).

• Short WordPress Tutorial (2007) (8 min.) – this tutorial shows you how to set up a WordPress blog, change its template, add categories, password-protect a post, and add a blogroll.
• Long WordPress Tutorial (45 min.) – go from the simple acts of joining all the way through set up and administration.
  
• Business Blogging 101 offers free tutorials on various topics.

(EMWegA)