Having a web presence is essential for writers today. It gives your readers a centralized place to learn about you and find your writing. If you’re a freelancer it gives editors and potential clients a place to view your clips and a way to contact you. It allows you to grow a mailing list by giving your readers a place to sign up for it. Your website is the one place on the internet that you control, and more control means more ways to grow your reader base and business.
If you’re looking to start a website or blog but don’t know how, look no further! I’ve got easy instructions to help you get set up with Bluehost.com, and if you use my affiliate link you also get a discount! You can follow the tutorial without using my affiliate link, but if you do it means I get a commission from your purchase, at no cost to you, and you get a discount on web hosting:
There are several reasons to go with Bluehost for your website: They are the #1 web hosting service recommended by WordPress.com They have one-click WordPress installation so you don’t have to worry at all about the technical details. They have excellent customer support, so if anything goes wrong with the process you can call or chat with them and they’ll get it fixed ASAP. They have a ton of themes to make your website look amazing without you having to do any web coding at all.
It will help to have an idea of what you want your domain name to be before you go into this process. Your domain name is the name of your website, like www.example.com. It has to be unique, so all names are registered to ensure only one of them exists. Here are some tips:
- Have a list of names ready before starting. Don’t try and find out if someone else has that name already by typing it into the search bar of your web browser or by checking on GoDaddy.com before you’re ready to buy! Some believe those searches are collected and sold to people who then quickly buy the names and try to sell them back to you at a profit. This may or may not be an urban myth, but why take that chance? Just write out every version you may want to use and order them from most to least desired. That way you’re ready when you go in.
- Decide if you’re going to buy all versions of your name possible, or just one. Meaning, are you going to buy the .com, .net, and .org? There are a wide variety of suffixes to choose from now, so do a little research on how much it costs to register each domain name and what different suffixes are available.
You can register your name through many different companies. You can register a name and never actually build a website with it, or register it as part of the process of actually setting up a website. In order to set up a website you have to have a server to run your website on. Most people rent space on a commercial server so they don’t have the complications of setting up their own server. This is called purchasing web hosting. You then put together the code that determines the way your website looks.
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to register your name and purchase web hosting through Bluehost.com, then use one of the many free themes included with your plan to style your website. Don’t worry, you don’t have to know how to code anything! Bluehost automates almost the whole process so it’s all as easy as point and click. The longest parts are generally picking your name and then picking and customizing your theme. You can have the initial setup done in under a half hour, but it will likely take you longer to customize your theme and start adding content.
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