Setting up your Blog
My first post in the new Travel Advice section. An extremely clever and quirky designation for the help section of the Motorcade Blog.
I thought it would be a good idea to write a brief guide to some basics in setting up your blog at the Motorcade. Remember your blog is your own site, your place to express yourself, so it pays to take a little time to make it your own.
First things first. The Options Screen.
Once you’ve created your blog and logged in (the easy stuff), a good place to start your fiddling is the options link in your site admin. Here you can set up the very basic aspects of your blog, such as the name of the blog, and the title that appears underneath the main title in most themes.
While in options you will see a list of tabs where you can tweak the finer details of your blog. The Discussion tab is useful, especially as it contains options relating to allowing comments, comment moderation and so on.
Presentation
The Presentation options page is probably the quickest way to make your blog on the Motorcade more your own. By default all new blogs share the main theme used by the Motorcade, but it’s easy to update your blog to look very different at the touch of a button. We will be adding more themes over time to increase diversity and individuality. Of all the themese, one special option is ‘K2′ which allows many sub styles and options in the ‘K2 Options’ tab you will see if you chose this particular theme for your blog.
If you’re familiar at all with the Wordpress software and would like to use a theme we do not have installed at the Motorcade, please put a request in at our support forums.
Many themes also allow the use of “sidebar widgets”, which you can drag and drop into your pages to customise your page.
Manage
In the Manage section there are some important options and settings you may want to tweak and tune. Here can import blogs from other services (if you wish to import a MINI2 Blog, please see the support forums here.
You can do a lot of things here, the best thing to do is play and learn, you can add pages, edit and add categories (so things don’t show as “uncategorized” all the time).
Write
The most important page! Write your entries here. You have options to change the size, colour, font of your text and can also embed items like YouTube videos and photographs into your pages.
Be sure to edit or remove the boring, standard “Hello World” message too, make it your own. And don’t forget your About page too.
Most of all, have fun, and get creative.
