Setting Up a Blog for Class Discussion

I have spent the last two weeks reading and experimenting with setting a blog for the research portion of my thesis. It turns out that it is a very easy process. On Google's Blogger.com, all an instructor has to do is set up a Google account, format the look of the blog, decide on the settings, make an initial post, and invite the students to the blog. Students can accept the invitation and instantly then make a comment or post on the blog. If they do not have to make a Google account, when they try to accept the invite, then Blogger.com takes them through a five-minute process. They only have to type in four boxes: username, password, retype password, and verification word which is a slightly skewed nonsense word.
The process seems so simple now that I have done it. Though I had read sections of David Warlick's book, Classroom Blogging, and read the Help section on Google, the procedures seemed complicated. My students also struggled with making a Google account and accepting the invitation. I have spent hours emailing them with ideas for them to try. I spent classtime having them use my laptop to get a Google account. Some of the problems were that the graphics make it appear that a person have to create a blog in order to get a Google account. That is not so. By reading carefully, an account can be made without creating a blog.
Now that I have experiment and discovered many pitfalls, I have written some clearer instructions so next time I want to set up a blog for class discussion, it will be a breeze!