But that’s ok – it gives slightly less stupid people like me work.

So as an offer of great generosity and kindness I’ll knock out a WordPress-fuelled blog or company site for about £500. That’s $750 in American money.

The price will go up to £1,000 on March 13, so act quick!

You can create your own free blog using posterous and an email account. Or go to WordPress.com and do similar incredible things. But I know that some people have more money than sense. If that’s you, contact me and let’s go dine at expensive restaurants and develop a blog that’ll rock (only) your pants.

In the vast majority of cases, beer bloggers use Blogspot. I think it’s because when they started spinning yarns it was the only viable option for getting the word out.

Today there’s still only one option, in my book. It’s just that that option has changed.

People: if you blog, use WordPress!

If you don’t like making decisions or you enjoy procrastinating, then this may well be the easiest thing you ever do.

Why should I use WordPress?

• The user interface is simple and slick
• Track your visitor numbers and engagement with incredible stats
• Huge range of fantastic themes
• Massive selection of plugins to help you customise almost every element of your site
• Phenomenal support via forums and fellow users
• Amazing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• When you stop halfway through creating a masterpiece post, you get to click Save Draft. Now if that isn’t a CAMRA-endorsed, action, beggar me!

I cannot speak highly enough of this platform.

What do I do next?

• Choose whether you want to use the absolutely free version of WordPress or the far, far superior self-hosted version of WordPress

You can use the free version, if you like. I don’t, but it’s better than *******.

Okay, I’ll host my own WordPress installation. I’m feeling brave, and you have marvellous legs. What the hell do I do now?

You need to get a web hosting account. Or if you work in a university or in an IT department (at which point I should really be asking why the hell you’re reading this in the first place), you can host WordPress on your own server, you crafty devil.

Web hosting accounts are so damn cheap, they totally dismiss any rationale you may have for continuing with your blogspot or blogger site.

So which web host do you recommend, sister?

I’m all about Clook. Because they’ve not failed me once, and because for a few dollars a month I can add about eight domains to my plan. And no matter how many people come visit my site (I can dream…), I never run out of bandwidth.

Ok I’m Clook-ed up. Now what do I do?

Well, in the interests of your own safety and sanity, and my reputation, at this point I gotta tell you you’re gonna need a domain name. Something evocative, something sublime. I use GoDaddy because it’s simple and they love you like you do bread and butter pudding.

Buy a domain name for $7.49 a year from GoDaddy. Even better, once you’ve found what you want, use one of these discount codes and get it for much less!

I won’t go into more details at this point – tell me if you want me to in another post – but what you need to do now is:

• Go back to your welcome email from hostgator and look for where it talks about nameservers. Something like…

Your Nameservers:
NS1:    ns2169.hostgator.com
NS2:    ns2170.hostgator.com

You need these to tell GoDaddy so they can take the domain name you just bought and give it a home at hostgator. Hostgator will host your new website, see, so one needs to move to the other…

And now…?

Have a breather – take a draft. Log on to your Control Panel using the deets in the email you just got to welcome you to the hostgator clan (incidentally, these guys have just installed foosball tables and no end of mad, crazy good stuff for their staff in new offices. Happy staff, happy customers. Figures.)

Next you need to specify the domain name you just bought at GoDaddy. Add in a username, the folder on your web hosting account where you want your site to be (don’t worry about this stuff for now – but for organisation, go delete the .com bit from the location field because folders look stoopid with .com on the end).

Submit that and in about a minute you should have a ‘success’ type message. A folder has now been created where your site will be, and hostgator has linked your site (that you did all that nameserver malarkey with, earlier) to that folder.

Ok, surely you got light at the end of the tunnel… You mentioned WordPress. How does that fit into this ballache of a gig?

Patience, Jedi dear, for sunlight approaches. In fact only one final section of actions separates you from an Epiphany. You now need to go to Fantastico De Luxe – which is towards the bottom of your hostgator cPanel/control panel. Then do this:

• Click it
• Click WordPress on the left hand column in the next screen (under Blogs)
• Click New Installation on the right hand side
• Where it says Install in Domain, select your domain name/new home on the web.
• Complete the rest of the fields, hit Install WordPress

You’re done!

Almost…

You’re probably concerned that people will miss all the great work you’ve done so far at Blogger or Blogspot.

1. Export all your existing articles using this guide. It’s a cinch to import this stuff into your new WordPress site – like so.
2. Redirect people who go to your old blogspot or blogger web address by following these great instructions.

Not bad for a Thursday afternoon, eh? Now it’s your turn to be incredible.

If you have any questions on how to blog better, give me a shout.

I’m sensing excitement in the business world. Suddenly people are switching on their reality goggles and realising that the world really has moved on since 1987 and hot pants (whichever was in fashion more recently).

Businesses are starting to amaze more regularly:

The good:

• Gravity Forums for its astonishing dedication to customer service and listening to the folks who pay Carl’s wages.
• My eBay goods, the mic and the USB audio interface, delivered overnight. Stupendous.

A polarised remarkability:

• M-Audio not having produced a Windows 7 driver for its MobilePre USB. Beta is bullshit, guys – either release one that works, or just admit you don’t have a fucking clue.

Remarkable at either end of the satisfaction spectrum will get you press. Where Barnum talked about all being good publicity, I’m not so sure. But I’ll always cherish the moments of absolute frustration at the hands of this silver box’s non-compliance with the latest and greatest OS ever made, so the M-A school of sonic stupidity still gets recognition.

But we’re not yet at Business 2.0.

I’ll tell you why:

Until someone leads the pack and counsels subliminally all others that WordPress, CMS, community builders and Social CRM conjoin as a single, stellar future-focused strategy representing the only way to flow, we’ll still be stuck at just-past Iron Age in our evolution as champion entrepreneurs.

You have no idea – or maybe, just maybe, you have – how important a socially-extroverted philosophy is to any, all, enterprises. Now, and forever forth.

Forget the nonsense spouted about fiefdoms and lowest common denominators on the horizon as governmental non-believers in tech and the web catalyse a power struggle ending in the  meekest of digital offerings and a culmination of liberated speech.

We’re oblivious, in the main, to what is approximating in front of our very eyes. We’re wearing in metaphorical and existential contexts, across our entire peripheral vision, blinkers that stop horses fearing audience participation in their gallop. We want to do things by the book, as we have always done them.

Customers revolt. Customers talk. Customers do your business for you. Customers are in your business.

So why, oh why, have so few businesses seized the moment to galvanise community, CMS and CRM to stand so far ahead of their competition that they’ve already got the marathon medal before the race even began?

If you’re smart, you’ll lose the Six Sigma, Prince and all that nonsense, and stretch, flex and strengthen your understanding of what it takes to be a 21st century customer-focused corporation.

It takes participation; embracing customer want; delivering accurate, changing content via CMS that are in such an advanced state of development already that all you have to do is dance with Miss QWERTY. Drum up some server activity by installing open source SugarCRM locally, then deliver tailored social media messaging based on customer feedback, experience, and website analytics.

That’s it!

Rid the staff chaff, waste hanging around your business waist. Lose the factory approach (no wonder satisfactory is no longer enough) and deliver relevant, meaningful experiences.

Solve problems. Be the inspiration your customers want and need. Deliver extra value at every turn: insight, commentary, even speculation. Use any medium: face-to-face, virtual, podcast, vodcast, anything to be there when they want you. Be the real-life, real-time FAQ they desire and deserve.

We’re on the cusp of a tipping point where CMS admins with killer content coursing through their corpse, and community managers hugging the likes of BuddyPress and interweaving all corners of the business at a lodestar fulcrum, become your most valuable staff.

Make it work. Make it through the next year. Make yourself rich, successful and adored.

And be happy. You’ve just learned the most important lesson of the week.

It’s the break in successive increments of now. All that time you’ve spent working on a website.

Everything revolves around now.

You hit the Enter key. It’s do or die.

And finally, once hypertension has risen and fallen in your craw, once the pregnant pause lasting a lifetime has abated: everything is manifested in the WordPress login screen.

No more the ‘database not found’, no less than absolute, unabated delight.

Everything you worked for, has finally come to fruition.

Now what?

I blame – in the nicest sense possible – the lovely Jane Wells for starting it. In her blog she told us that she and Matt had spent a short time creating a website for the WordPress Foundation.

It looks a laudable effort to take WordPress to an even greater audience through outreach projects designed to get more folks blogging.

Or as Matt Mullenweg himself would have it:

to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

Details, conceded Jane, are scant. And a cursory scan over the WordPress Foundation site provides little more information than what’s already been said.

Creating the Foundation as an official non-profit organisation is the right start. As they say, it’s all about creating a stable [and free] platform for web publishing for generations to come.

With all the banter and feud over GPL I wonder how many developers will rally to this apparently innocuous cause? I, for one, with a modicum of skill in the coding department, would be happy to contribute in any way to making blogging a part of the school curriculum, for example.

I found a letter I wrote to a pen pal about 20 years ago. It reminded me in a sugary way how cool it was to wait for the postie to deliver news from a friend you’d never met, but connected to via ink and paper.

Imagine how distant a reality that is, today. The idea of spending an hour or two composing a message to be read by an audience, even if that audience numbers just one.

With texts, Facebook and Twitter, kids don’t have the wherewithall or resolve to chatter through dozens of paragraphs of insight into the comings and goings of life. One thing pen-palling instituted in me was a fondness for the welfare of others. You don’t get that from an impersonal, acutely concise electronic message.

So blogging, for me, should be as letter-writing was for the boot-strapped kids of the 80s. Given precedence in academic environments. Inspiring people to create new worlds through words rather than pixels.

And did I mention the WordPress Foundation website is built on the 3.0 platform?

So I mentioned three, twice. That makes six. I’ll have four reasons to say ‘A-HA!’ later to reach my tally of 10 for the day… If you don’t get it, read the sticky post a the top of my home page!

And all are free.

1. The fantastic and free WordPress theme, Atahualpa
2. Bamboo Invoice
3. Rolopress

Atahualpa is the first free WordPress theme I’ve ever come across – and that is quite literally EVER – that offers all the options you could possibly need, wrapped into the funkiest and easiest of Options interfaces in the platform’s admin area.

It deservedly receives plaudits from all over the place. Some have granted it such high repute as to rank among the elite of paid themes such as Chris Pearson’s Thesis (which is damn good, but I ain’t gonna learn hooks right now – I have too much scrawling to do).

Why?

• No need to run down the Headspace/All In One SEO route – it’s all built in!
• Everything is customisable – crucially, for beginners upwards – via the Options panel
• Stack of widgets available out the box. Man, this is crazy cool.

Most importantly…

• It works the second you install it. Even premium themes take a bit of clobber setting up to look awesome. But this… well, it’s sensational.

Of course you can donate (that’s the perk of GPL for me – developers who offer you the chance to reward them fiscally, rather than forcing you to pay in advance and in many cases, pay unsighted for their failures) but it’s not mandatory. Atahualpa simply rocks. If you do blogging, seriously consider this theme.

As a writer of disputable but paid repute, I value my time above anything else. So you can fathom I’m incredibly moved to post what is essentially a free ad for these three denizens of the web realm.

Bamboo Invoice does what a ton of paid services do – better. I love this crazy stuff. Setting it up on a server is a cinch, and a couple of quick button presses and you have your very own fully-fledged invoice system. In an age where we’re all eating each other to save cash, this is the way forward for your fledgling accounting efforts. Hell, I’m rubbish at maths but even I can use this baby.

Rolopress converts a WordPress install into a contact management system. It’s dead easy to use, totally widgetable and is much better than Cloud computing (when it rains, it rains) because you retain complete control of all the data.

Punch in the sensational WP DB Backup plugin to your WordPress platform and you have totally bulletproof data, whenever and wherever you want it.

And on that note…

Have yourself a merry little weekend and see you next week!