Sara Are you an educator looking into starting a blog so that your students can easily access the lessons that you need to teach? With everything shifting online, from parties to classrooms, setting up a website is essential in today’s world. Also the fact that students from all around the world will have the chance to view your lessons makes the idea of putting up a blog more attractive.
If you are starting out from scratch, here are the five easy steps you need to do to set up your educator blog site.
Step #1: Register your domain
Domain is the address of your blog site. The string of words that you see in the browser’s address bar that contains .com is the domain. In order to establish your presence online, it is important to get a domain so that your visitors have an address to go to.
You can choose any domain name as long as it’s available. To establish your credibility as an educator, you can choose to have your name and your profession as your domain name, such as TeacherThompson.com. There are a lot more domain extensions to choose from aside from .com such as .school and .academy. GoDaddy is a domain registrar where you can check if the domain that you want is still available.
Aside from registering domains, GoDaddy also offers web hosting and other web services, which leads us to the next step of your website making journey.
Step #2: Subscribe to a web hosting service
Web hosting is the service that enables your website to stay in the internet. All the pages of your website are stored in special computers called servers, which web hosting companies have. When your student types in your domain address, the student’s browser will automatically deliver the pages of your website that are stored in the servers.
Kinsta is a web hosting service provider that is focused on WordPress, a website publishing system that is the easiest and most flexible content management system that beginners can use. With just $30 a month for basic Kinsta subscription, you will be sure that your website is up and running 24/7 as they check the statuses of their websites every 2 minutes. The MyKinsta Dashboard will also give you your site statistics real time. Your website will also have security from unintended recipients because of the SSL/CDN protocol that is included in the basic Kinsta subscription.
Step #3: Select a WordPress theme
Once the site is hosted, you can choose the WordPress theme that goes with the style that you intend for your educator site. This impacts the experience of your site visitors. Well designed websites also look more credible than poorly designed ones.
ThemeForest has a library of WordPress themes that you can use for a certain fee. It is also arranged into categories, which makes it easier for you to browse the style that will suit your educator site.
If WordPress setup confuses you, you can reach out to your web hosting provider, like Kinsta. They usually guide their clients through this process.
Step #4: Determine your educator blog goals
After setting up all the technical side of the site, now is the time to determine the reason of the existence of the blog. You should be able to establish the “why” of your site. Aside from putting lessons out there, what is the purpose of your blog? For whom are you making the site? What value does your site contribute to your target visitors? What tone will you use to communicate to them? Once you are able to answer these questions, you can start working on the content of your blog.
Step #5: Stock up on free resources
Blog posts can be boring if these are presented in just plain text. Visuals often accompany these posts to spare the visitors from a huge block of text. Make sure that the photos you use are free to use to avoid copyright issues.
There are many royalty-free image hosting sites available online that you can use. Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash and Freeimages are just some of the sites you can get images that will not get you into a copyright limbo.
Many educators have done this already so it is important to identify your niche as an educator and make your blog unique from the others. If you have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, now is the high time for you to do this, since everything is done online recently.
Putting up a website requires much effort but when you realize the impact that this will bring to your students and other students worldwide, everything will be worth it.
