Establishing your online presence (Part II): Putting up your website

11Nov/090

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In Part I of the "Establishing your online presence" series, we discussed selecting a webhosting provider. In this article, we will discuss how you can quickly and easily design and construct a new website using an open-source tool available via the Internet.

Once you have signed up for a webhosting account and picked your domain name, the next step involves putting up a website.

Creating Your Website

Many people think that putting up a website involves hiring a web designer, waiting a few weeks for the site design, and paying a web administrator to maintain and update the website. Others think that putting up a website involves taking classes in HTML and spending hours learning how to use expensive web design tools like Dreamweaver.

Enter Wordpress

In fact, Wordpress is a free, open-source, and (relatively) easy-to-use platform that anyone can use to quickly create a website. One of the great things about my recommended webhosting service, Blue Host, is that a video tutorial on how to install Wordpress is included with your webhosting subscription. When you install Wordpress on your webhosting account, this Wordpress installation is typically known as a "self-hosted Wordpress blog."

The greatest strength of Wordpress lies in its ease of customization. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Wordpress theme templates that allow the user to instantly change the look and feel of their site. There is a large open-source movement that generates and supports plug-ins (bits of code that performs a function such as, for example, display Twitter updates of the author). The plug-ins allow people who have no interest in combing through code to quickly include new functionality to their Wordpress blogs.

Wordpress.com vs. Self-Hosted Wordpress

If you just want to experiment with Wordpress, check out Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com is a web service that hosts your Wordpress blog for you, usually for free. A trade-off is that your addresses usually take the form of <YourSite'sName>.wordpress.com. Another major trade-off is that you are severely restricted from running advertising on your Wordpress.com blog. Because of these restrictions, I would recommend that you either start with a self-hosted Wordpress blog or migrate your Wordpress.com blog to a self-hosted Wordpress blog as soon as you decide to monetize your traffic to your site.

So, what does this all mean?

In my case, I registered for a webhosting account with Blue Host and installed Wordpress in a matter of minutes. Less than two hours later, I had a live, customized site with a few posts. So, here are a couple of items you can do right now and should take about two hours.

Sign up for webhosting.
Install Wordpress in your webhosting account
Find a theme that you like
Install the theme
Write your first post --- You are LIVE!

And you didn't even need to pay a web designer....

Note: The link to Blue Host is an affiliate link. If you click on the Blue Host affiliate link and subsequently purchase web hosting, I will receive a commission on the sale.

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