Volunteer Session on Blogging

Yesterday, you may have noticed an additional blog post. This was posted by one of the volunteers during our volunteer blogging session.

I decided to run a session on blogging after some of the volunteers expressed an interest in finding out how it worked. I focused the talk on blogging with WordPress as that is what we use. I started by talking about the purpose of blogs and the niche nature of most successful blogs. I explained that there are blogs on any and every subject you can imagine and if you are intending to start writing it is worth spending some time reading first.

Freshly Pressed - A range of blogs on WordPress

I showed the volunteers how WordPress worked from the beginning and how to set up a new blog with a free account. We looked at choosing themes, adding widgets, creating pages and the purpose of pages and how to add new posts with images.

One of the volunteers had a go with something she had written about her time volunteering and successfully created a post. The main thing I wanted the volunteers to take away from the session was that once the blog is set up it is fairly easy to create new posts and add content. I asked the volunteers to think about this while they are doing their research and if they come across something particularly interesting or something they would like to share to let me know so we can create a post about it together.

I am hoping in the future to be able to include more posts contributed by volunteers to this blog as I think it is important to show other perspectives of the project and to give the volunteers a voice.