When you think about WordPress blogging you maybe imagine a hinterland of obsessed loners, hunched over their keyboards, typing into the night, unloved and unseen.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Let me tell you a story.

I have a friend, let’s call her Liz,  who recently did me a big favour and, when I insisted on doing something in return, she said I could teach her blogging. Now, although I immediately agreed,  I privately had my doubts. Here’s a (let’s be polite) mature lady with no great love of computers and an impatience with anything that is too technical.

She explained that she wanted to start a blog to keep her family in touch. She has four children in three countries and they have given her six grandchildren who, because of their parents’ businesses, travel frequently. She wanted each member of the family to be able to post their news and photographs and for other members of the family to comment on them. And she wanted this blog to be private: she didn’t want it indexed in the search engines, she wanted it accessible only to her family.

Fine. WordPress will let you do all of that, but I imagined a long learning curve for this total, untutored newbie . So, I printed out a copy of my free WordPress tutorial and took it round to her house.

We sat down at her computer and I guided her through the first few pages of the ebook. She did exactly what it said although she confessed total incomprehension at first. But, after we had been through the process of creating her WordPress account and selecting the theme, she began to see what was going on. With a little bit of help from me she made her ‘About’ page and she typed up and published her first post. And, we added a picture.

To my amazement, when she saw what she’d done, she immediately ‘got it’. We were soon going over to the section where you can set up authorised users and she added her sons, daughters and grandchildren.

Then, with a little bit of help from me, she emailed all her family with instructions on how to get their own WordPress accounts so that they could log in and contribute to the blog.  She instructed them all to download my tutorial and work through it. They are used, I am sure, to doing exactly what she tells them!

I left them to it. I kept in touch with her by phone and she called me a few times over the next few days to let me know how they were getting on.

The first to come on board was her son in Australia. He put up a lovely post with some pictures of his horse taken from his phone. And his young daughter added an account of how she had done in her gym class. Dad added a photo of her in her gym kit. And granny replied back with news of her old horse. And she put up another picture she had taken at Christmas of another grandchild with a face painting.

I was impressed.  But I was even more impressed the next time I went to see her and she showed me their blog on her computer. All by herself, she’d uploaded one of her photos and made it into the blog’s header! It looked totally beautiful and her family had all contributed to their unique blog, free of charge, keeping them all in touch from around the world.

Families can be together in a blog even when they are thousands of miles apart. Distance is no barrier. WordPress works for families as well as the web-geeks!

This is a true story.

What’s the best way to learn WordPress?

As with anything unfamiliar, the best way to start learning WordPress is to start simple.

If you are starting from absolutely Square One then don’t expect to leap straight into Square Nine! On the contrary, start at the beginning and progress step by step, one step at a time.

If you are a newbie, or you have no prior blogging experience, you might find the first two or three steps to be quite a steep learning curve. But the good news is that the curve soon flattens out and you begin, quite quickly, to ‘get it’. Just stick with the first few unfamiliar steps and you’ll soon be up and running.

Trust me, once you become familiar with the WordPress environment you’ll find it easy to explore and experiment and find your own way round.

If you have big ambitions about your blog, particularly if you want to use your blog to make money, you should be planning to go the WordPress.org route where you hang your blog on your own domain.

But, use the WordPress.com free blogging option as your practice ground. Learn the ropes first: practice, experiment and learn. Then when you’re comfortable with WordPress.com, then you can upgrade to WordPress.org.

Ready to begin? Check out my free WordPress tutorial to get you started on WordPress.com now!