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Bit of a long winded enquiry here. Firstly what websites (apart from this one) do you regularly go to to get your football or general sports news. I'm not talking mainstream media here more so websites that are run by an individual or a group who may be open to taking articles/submissions.

 

The reason I am asking is that I have recently stopped covering boxing but I would like to continue writing about sport in some way shape or form. I thought a good way to get back into the writing chair would be to cover Scotland's upcoming opening Euro 2020 qualifiers.

 

Finally, failing a suitable outlet existing or wanting to run anything I write does anyone know anything about setting up your own website, how to go about it, costs etc?

 

Any info and/or advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

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4 hours ago, morrie21 said:

Bit of a long winded enquiry here. Firstly what websites (apart from this one) do you regularly go to to get your football or general sports news. I'm not talking mainstream media here more so websites that are run by an individual or a group who may be open to taking articles/submissions.

 

The reason I am asking is that I have recently stopped covering boxing but I would like to continue writing about sport in some way shape or form. I thought a good way to get back into the writing chair would be to cover Scotland's upcoming opening Euro 2020 qualifiers.

 

Finally, failing a suitable outlet existing or wanting to run anything I write does anyone know anything about setting up your own website, how to go about it, costs etc?

 

Any info and/or advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

You can get your own blog at Blogspot or wordpress.com, but presumably you'll want to do this reasonably professionally?

If so, you'll need:

1. A domain name. Expect to pay around £15 per year for a .com.

2. Somewhere to host it.  Get this from the same company you register the domain with, e.g. GoDaddy, CloudNext, as otherwise you'll be messing about with nameservers (and you don't want that if you're non-techie).  Hosting should set you back no more than 3-4 quid a month.

3. A Content Management System to put all your reports into.  The most popular around is Wordpress.  All hosts will have this already available so you can set it up with one click.  However, Wordpress has just done a major update that's rendered their Editor interface utterly incomprehensible.  I'd therefore recommend...

4. A customised Wordpress theme.  You can find some in your area of interest here - https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress?term=sport news.  As you can see they usually cost around £40-£50.  The support with themes from this site is great though.  The developers will be back to you quickly with any answers and I think you usually get around 6 months free support.  Well worth it.  You can get a General theme like Divi which is great and cheaper, but if you see a customised one you like then go for that.  There's no limit to how you can customise it and make it truly yours.

It's worth noting as well that with Wordpress you get access to a gigantic number of "plugins" that you can use to set things up exactly how you want, e.g. you might want to stop spambots from grabbing your email address from the site - there's a plugin for that; you might want to set up Google Analytics to keep an eye on the traffic you're getting and from where - there's a plugin for that, etc, etc.

Hope this helps.

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I can't help much with the above. Footballscotland.co.uk is a site/twitter feed I have been using recently. 

I enjoyed your boxing write ups you posted on here though, so I hope you stick with the writing. Best of luck. 

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Thanks Daviebee - fantastic info in your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to type all of that out. If I do go down the road of setting something up for myself I will use your post as a reference point.

 

Cheers Parklife - thanks for the feedback and mentioning that website. I will have a look.

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