Build your blog
So you've signed up for a blog and you're eager to get started, but what do you do first? It's a little confusing if you have never blogged. Before you start you need to look through all the tutorials for the things you wish to do. Well here in this tutorial is all the basic yet important things you can do with your blog.
Logging in
The first thing you need to do to get started is go to your blog http://<yourblog>.blog-city.com and login. You will see in on the top right of your blog Log-In, enter the email and password you used to create the blog with and continue. You can also click My Blog to login, if you are already logged in it will take you straight to administration. Note, if you have more than one blog under the same email a list will appear for you to choose from.
Design your theme
The first thing most people do is decide how their blog is going to look. Everything about your blogs theme can be found under the Skin tab menu.
Choose from a series of predefined skins, and then customise to a level thats comfortable for you
- Step 1: Base Skin - Choose from a variety of skins.
- Step 2: Customise - Alter your theme by choosing a different header, fonts and colours.
- Step 3: CSS Wizard - fine tune your style using our wizard tool
- Step 4: CSS Editor - If your a CSS wizard already - edit directy for the perfect blog look
Design your Widgets
Next you want to layout the data from your blog, you do this under the Widgets menu tab.
You will have the option to choose from 4 areas
- Main Site: This is your main blog layout
- Private Area: This allows you to give permission to blog-city users to view your private entries. This replaces the Members Area and also Security Zones
- Site Entry: This allows you to set consistent text or imagery surrounding each of your blog entries.
- Custom home page: This is an optional layout which you can switch on, it will allow you to do something completely new and out of the ordinary from your main blog area. Many people use this for Flash Intros
There are over 40 different widgets for you to choose from. A widget is a piece of code, written by us to use your data on your blog. For example, there is a "latest entries" widget. Just drop it onto your blog and instantly you have a customisable widget showing your latest entries.
Start blogging
So you have your own individual blog now to start blogging and tell everyone about you. To get started go to your compose page and simply write an entry.
Now to add an entry, let's start with an example. How about you tell everyone about yourself. In the title box put "my profile" then in the blog entry box put a little about you, for instance your name your hobbies and things you like. On the left you will notice the Control panel
To publish your new profile, click the publish radio button (1), then Save entry (2). You can preview the entry if you want (3), or if you decide to remove it, throw it in the Trash (4). If you want to start again with a new entry just click Create New (5).