The sun shines a little brighter today.

Today I relaunched my local portal website www.atFishers.com on the new multi-user blog platform WordPress Mu. After over 8 months of tinkering, testing, loading and unloading, and tweaking….I’ve finally launched the future of what I think will be many online communities.

For those of you who have attended my workshops or classes on Internet marketing, you know that I always recommend BlogSpot.com (owned by Google) to newbie bloggers. Why? Because it is easy, much easier to set up and work in than any other blog platform.

However, my follow-up comment to this endorsement is always “when you get ready, you’ll want to move to WordPress.org.” Why? Because it is awesome!

WordPress is an open source blog platform with a legion of dedicated developers creating all types of extra add-ons (or widgets) to give your blog some awesome functionality.  If you don’t have a hosting provider (which if you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t have one) they will host your weblog for you for free on WordPress.com. Every free hosting service comes with a catch, except this one. The only downside of having WordPress.com host your blog is that you can’t put outside code, banner ads, or AdSense ads on your blog.

I stumbled across WordPress.com late last year while doing some research for my book in progress. I then graduated on to WordPress.org, the open source development community for WordPress where you can download the software for free and they will even help you install it (at no charge by the way). I started hosting a few WordPress blogs, including this one, and then started learning the php code underneath WordPress. Believe me, I’m no programmer. Just four years ago I was figuring out FrontPage which is essentially the Microsoft Word of web design.

But then, on a cold January morning earlier this year, while looking for yet another cool plug-in for my TomBritt.com blog, I found the multi-user version of WordPress: WordPress Mu. Being a local portal person with now a few months of WordPress experience under my belt, I downloaded and installed this multi-user blog system on my host and just fell in love with it.

After 8 months, I’ve finally moved just about every local website that I had built in FrontPage over to this new blog network I’m calling the Geist Blogs Network.  The benefits are huge:

• Two-step self-service process to create a blog within the network
• Themed templates gives each user the ability to customize their blog to be unique
• Shared traffic within the blog network
• Updates are easy: “if you can use MS Word, you can post to your blog.”
• One search for entire blog network

And the list goes on.  I encourage you to check out the Geist Blogs Network. I’ll be launching a similar online community for authors within the month. Stay tuned!