Entries Tagged 'CMS' ↓

I guess it’s no surprise that Blackboard has acquired yet another company, Xythos. As CMS/LMS options shrink, universities and schools using Blackboard will continue to look at alternatives to keep their options open and hope for more competition in the market. This competition is desperately needed to push Blackboard into refining and improving its product. Since the days of CourseInfo, not much has changed with Blackboard. Let’s hope the mergers and acquisitions are steps for this company to make significant improvements and take this product to the next level.

When I decided to retool my website at work into something useful, I first thought I would use Blogger. I had used Blogger once before while teaching a class on music technology. But I decided that I wanted the blog to stand on its own and to be hosted on a server other than the web server at work in my personal directory. I knew it was time to break down and buy a my own domain name.

While domain shopping, I considered buying my name as a domain. I decided not to do that for reasons mentioned previously. I didn’t want the blog to be about me, so why would I choose that as a domain? After checking many variations of instructional, technology (two very long words), digital, learning, etc., I was happy to discover that digitalearning.org was available. At that point, I stopped shopping for the cheapest domain/host available and decided to focus on which blog tool I would use. I found this great webpage at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication that compares many blogging tools. After reading the page, I decided on WordPress with price being a big factor. It’s free!

The WordPress website has a lot of great information including information on finding a web host. Based on their recommendations I chose bluehost. There may be better deals out there and I won’t go through all the specs in this post, but after a quick check on Go Daddy and many other recommendations on the WordPress website, I considered their offering the best. I particularly liked the auto installation feature of WordPress and many other tools like TikiWiki and Moodle. A domain name, domain listing privacy, and site promotion are also included in the bluehost offering.

Deciding on a domain name and finding a web host were the easiest parts of the job. After signing up with bluehost and installing WordPress, I then spent what seemed like forever deciding on a theme for my blog. Be warned; there are a ton of themes. You can sort the themes by layout and colors, etc, but I had limited success with this.

If you’re starting a blog with a new domain, best of luck. I hope you’ll find this information useful.