Starting A Web Site
I got to thinking and maybe we started off a little fast for some people yesterday so today we will go over some steps to having your own website.
1. You need a name and a idea of what the site will be about or for. There are so many topics out there but you should try and focus on something that you enjoy writing about. If you don’t enjoy it then your chances of having a successful website will decrease rapidly and you may give up on it before you even get started good on it.
2. You need to obtain your domain name and somewhere to host your site. On this point I recommend buying your domain name and hosting instead of using a free service. The reason for my suggestion is that if you are using a free service they have control over your site in some type of way. Some of them do not allow you to monetize your site. Why not go ahead and make a little investment in your site? For $2 you can have an .info domain paid for a year and for another $4 you can pay for hosting for the first month with an economy plan from Go Daddy. When I started my first web site back in December I purchased my domain name and one month of hosting with the deluxe plan. After getting Open Road Biker set up I decided to go ahead and commit for a year for my hosting and also pick up 2 more domain names. I picked up 6 more domain names in April when I got this one. At this point the small amount of money I have made off of my Open Road Biker sites has paid for it all and that was all I expected or hoped for in the first year. If you want to try Go Daddy then here is a link;
3. When you have your hosting sorted out and your domain name assigned to name servers (Go Daddy will help you with all of that) then you need to choose whether you are going build your own site from the ground up, have some one else do it, or use an existing web application. I chose the application route. There are so many out there for many different types of sites and a lot of them are free. If you want a forum for instance then SMF is a good application that is free and has a lot of support, word press is popular in the blogging community, and joomla is a great content management system. They are all different when it comes to installation but again Go Daddy is there to help.
Once your app is installed then you can begin setting it up. We will go over some setup stuff with Word Press as an example in the next installment of this article.
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