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 |  Subject: How To Publish Your First Website 11.03.12 4:27 | |
| If you’ve been following this blog, you should know how important it
is to have an online portfolio if you want to live from your art. While
you don’t have a website you simply don’t exist, and of course, people
who don’t exist work very little. In this post i’ll explain what you have to do to have your first
website online. I wont talk about web design, for that there are
thousands of tutorials and books. 1.- Choose a domain nameA domain is a name used to redirect Internet users to your website. For example, my domain is www.sosnewbie.com. It seems obvious, but finding a good domain name is a very important step and for that we need to ask this questions:
- Who is our audience?
- What’s our website’s objective?
- I want short ot large term results?
- What’s the vision and mission of mi website?
It’d be ideal to create a list of possible names, since many of them wont be available. Here you have a few recommendations:Names easy to remember Short names are
easier to remember and to write, although there are also long names easy
to remember like dividebycero.com or whatsgoingoninyouhome.com Related to your activity… or not. There
are two sides, the ones that consider that your domain name should be
related to your activity (ie: webdesign.com) and the ones that think you
should create a brand (ie: sosfactory.com). In the first case you’ll
have an advantage at the time of google ranking for the words design and
web, but there are two problems: normally these domains are hard to
find and since they are so generic it’s difficult to put them
personality. If you want to create a portfolio where the quantity is more
important than the quality, and what you need is many clients of low
budget, probably webdesign.com would be the best choice. I’d go for the
second option, the creation of an independent brand, it’s much better in
a long term. Local vs International sales. If you
plan on selling your designs in your city you can use something like
madridwebdesign.com which will give you almost instantly rank one in
Google for searches like “madrid web design”. As i said, this depends on
your sales strategy. I personally prefer selling internationally since
there are many potencial clients. Extensions. It’s best if you use .com although i wouldn’t be bad to register also the .net and your country extension (.es in Spain). Careful with special characters. For
example the letter Ñ if you’re spanish, or the letter ß if you’re
german. If you decide for a local market there’s no problem, but if you
want to sell you design internationally, you’re automaticaly discarded.Careful with the numbers, hyphens, abbreviations.
Careful with numbers, when you say it orally it might lead to
confusions (ie: adsl4u.com , adslfouryou.com or adslforyou.com or
adslfouru.com…). Don’t use hyphens or abbreviatures. Careful with pronunciation. If you plan
to have international clients research how your domain sounds at least
in english, and if there are similar words that can be a problem. Careful with coincidences. Inverstigate
the market, you can’t use a name for your business that another company
is using already which makes the same activities that you do. They can
sue you, and even take your domain. Register all the possibilities related with your domain.
This can be more expensive but it’s a lot better in a long term, you
try to register your domain and all the possible variations that someone
can write by mistake (ie: google.com, gogle.com, gooogle.com,
gugle.com…).2.- Hire web hostingWeb hosting is the physical place where your website is, every time
someone visits your website, a server (a computer) will be in charge to
show it. So imagine how important is to hire the services of a good
hosting company. If you look around the Internet, you’ll be crazy when you see the
ammount of offers out there, thousands of companies fighting to sell
their product. I have my websites netword hosted in Downtownhost.com and i love it, if
you’re not very experienced, the most important at the time of hiring a
good hosting is finding a company with a great customer service. If your website starts from zero, the cheapest hosting plan (5-8 US$ per year) will do for a while. Don’t even think of going with mega-hosting-companies where you have
to go through 4 different departments for anything. Also don’t use free
hostings, they normally have lots of ads, are slow and barely
professional. If you decide to hire web hosting in Downtownhost.com
but you’re not an expert at english don’t worry, Jorge, the owner, also
speaks spanish and very kindly will help you through messenger. Hiring your hosting isn’t too much of a mistery; you only need Paypal
or a credit card and follow the instructions. At the end of the process
you should recieve an email with your username and password to enter
the control panel, and your name servers, we’ll see what they’re for
later. PS: Before hiring investigate in google about the company. You don’t want to end up with companies like HostingLMI o Fenixer
that for a marital fight he left 4.000 clients for months (i was one of
them) without tech service and without possibilities of recovering
their domains… with sues, minors in the middle, ex-convicts… a spectacle
worthy of a soap opera. 3.- Check if your domain is availableOk, we’ve already hired our hosting and we have a list of possible
domain names for our online portfolio, now we have to see which domains
of that list are available. For that there are thousands of tools if you
want to check if your domain is available… If it is, run to register it. 4.- Register your domain nameTo register your domain there are two ways, one is to do it through
your hosting company (not recommended, if you want to know why, read
below) or through domain registering companies, i use Godaddy, if you don’t know english search for a domain registrar in your language in Google.Registering a .com domain is about 10 US$ per year, the best is to
buy it for several years, that way it’s cheaper… it also looks like
Google takes that into account when ranking your website. Registering a domain isn’t that complicated, you only need Paypal
or a credit card and follow the indications. If everything goes well,
you should recieve an email with your username and password to enter the
administration panel of your domain (don’t confuse it with your hosting
control panel, they’re different things). ***VERY IMPORTANT!!! many web hosting companies offer a free domain
when hiring their services. Never use this domain for your business,
Why?:
- Generally they don’t let you access to the control panel of the
domain, so for anything you have to go through the customer care service
of the company… which can be annoying in some cases.
- If it happens that you want to change the company because you’re not
happy with their service, you’ll only have problems when trying to
recover your domain name (ie: changing the name servers to your new
hosting company).
You should take into account that registering a .com domain is only a
few dollars, what is really expensive is the work that you’ll invest in
it’s promotion. So it’s better to be the owner of your domain. 5.- Point the domain name servers to your hosting accountWe already have a registered domain and a hosting account, next we
have to tell the domain to point to our hosting account. This way, every
time someone writes on the internet our domain name, they’ll see what
we have in our server.First we need to know the name servers of our hosting; generally they
come in the confirmation email when you hire the service, they should
be two, a primary and a secondary, something like ns1.domainname.com and
ns2.domainname.com. If you have any doubts, you should contact your
hosting company (that’s why the customer service is so important) and
ask them directly. Now we have to go to our domain’s control panel, depending on the
registrar it may vary, what you have to do is looks how to change the
domain name servers by default, y change them with yours
ns1.domainname.com and ns2.domainname.com. If everything went well, your domain should be pointing to your
hosting account, now you have to upload your website to the server.6.- Upload your website files to your serverTo upload your files to the server you can do it via the Cpanel of
your hosting account or better, you can upload them via a FTP client,
which is a software.There are hundreds of free and paid FTP softwares, i recommend you not to start with complicated programs at first. I use a very simple one called FlashFXP, which is paid.To connect to your server you’ll need some information that should appear in the email they sent you:
- IP Address: address of your website. Something like: 209.62.60.132 or you can also put your domain name.
- Username.
- Password.
After you put all this data you should be able to connect to the
server. If you take a look, it’s like browsing through your hard drive,
you have to go to the folder /public_html/ and there’s where you have to
upload your website files.It’s very important that the main page of your site is called index.html.
And that’s it, i’ve tried to explain in the best possible way and as
detailed as i can, if you have any problem or doubt write a comment and
i’ll try to explain it to you.
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