Start a Website Already
Well we have jibber jabbered long enough about getting ready to start a website, today is the day our precious new baby is born, because we are going to turn that awesome domain name we bought into a bright and shiny piece of virtual realty called a website.
Before we start, we should probably double check and make sure we have everything we need to get this done.
So what is a checklist that we should have in place before we can officially launch?
- Secure a domain name (example www.mynewdomainname.com)
- Decide and sign up with a hosting company(examples godaddy or Themescapes hosting)
- Sit down at a computer with internet access
That’s it, in its most basic form you can launch a website once these three things are done. So lets go over how to do it.
The first thing you are going to need to do is find out the nameservers your hosting company wants you to use. Don’t get scared by the word nameserver it is just a fancy way of telling the world where to find your website.
Think of it as if you rented a space in a shopping mall and your store space that you rented was labeled by the mall as suite #36. Your address in the phone book and post office would be something like:
My Cool Store
Some Shopping Mall, Suite #36
YourTown, TX 99999
Now lets pretend a year later you grew out of that space and wanted a bigger one. The same shopping mall had a great space just up the path from your current space. So you move your shop to that new space, space #48. Your address would now be:
My Cool Store
Some Shopping Mall, Suite #48
YourTown, TX 99999
Nameserves are the Internet version of your address and They are stored in the DNS (Domain Name System), which functions some what like a Yellow Pages on crack for the online world.
So, taking a deep breath, now that all that is said we need to find out what nameservers our hosting company would like us to use and make those changes on our domain. Usually your hosting company will send you an email or notify you through your account once you sign up what those nameservers are to be. If you can’t find them, a quick email to their support should do the trick.
Most nameservers look something like:
ns#.somedomain.com
As an example, one of godaddy’s nameservers is NS43.domaincontrol.com. Although a more typical one like at our parent company Themescapes is ns1.blogiology.com.
To change the nameservers you will need to login into your domain hosting account and find where the area for domain management. This may be called Domain Manager, Account Manager, etc. If you can’t find it do a quick search for nameservers on the company’s website or once again send a quick email to their support folks.
Once you locate it you will want to make the necessary changes. Important! Almost always there are multiple nameservers you will need to assign. For instance all customers at Themescapes.net hosting use two nameserver entries. ns1.blogiology.com and ns2.blogiology.com. It is important that you only use the nameservers you were given. Your domain manager may have spots for three nameservers. If you were only give two from your hosting company, place them in the first two spots and leave the third one blank.
When you are all done and click “enter” or “save”, you most likely are going to get some kind of warning like, “Are you sure you want to do this?”, feel free to ignore it and carry on there is no danger of unintended explosions!
Great you officially have a domian being hosted on the Internet! Woo Hoo!……
Uh oh, not so fast! Just because you have a domain hosted does not mean you have a website. All you have done is direct the world to your store in the shopping mall, now you have to build a store for them to come to!
And that’s where we will leave it for today! Next time we will work on building our website.
Blog By Numbers – Let’s Start a Blog Together
So you want to start a blog, but you really have no idea where to start. Great! Then you have came to the right place. Here at Blogiology we are going to walk you through the blog process from conception to successful blog.
As a matter of fact, we are going to build Blogiology right in front of you post by post discussing our every move. You are going to get to watch it change as we upgrade theme designs, add plugins, bring in advertisements, promote it across the web, and optimize if for search engines.
This approach is designed to allow you to start a new blog and follow us step by step. You can completely emulate our blog, (other than the writing obviously) or take the information and examples we give you post by post and customize them to give your blog your unique feel and presence.
Eventually along this process you are going to become more and more comfortable in the blogging world, and will completely take off on your own! That is when we get the satisfaction of watching you fly!
Let’s get started! Just follow the simple steps below! Read more
What is a Blog?
According to Wikepedia, the definition of a Blog is as follows:
A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.
Over the last ten years blogs have taken over the Internet, they have long past their original intent of online journals or diaries and have exploded into practically the new “popular” face of the World Wide Web. The fact is that for nearly any hobby, occupation, technology, habit, illness, or desire in the World, it is very likely there are several high quality blogs being published and regularly updated on the subject.
What does that mean for the public? Just as the invention of the Internet fueled a tremendous advance in the overall knowledge base of societies, blogs have taken that a step further by improving the quality of that information as well as the overall quantity.
How has the invention of blogs and their rapid rise in popularity done so much improving of the quality and quantity of the information available to the general public. It has done this by bringing the ability to use the Internet for information sharing into the hands of anyone who has that information and the desire to share it.
Blogging platforms, such as Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, and others have greatly decreased the amount of skill and experience required to launch and maintain a quality website that can still be appealing to the general public. Furthering this movement of web creation to the general public is the fact many of these platforms, including two of the ones mentioned above, allow for absolutely free hosting of these sites. These factors have led to the creation of literally millions of bloggers and even more blogs!
Many of these blogs, such as problogger.net, have worked their way up from being small informational hubs to financial powerhouses drawing tens of thousands of readers and making hundreds of thousands of dollars. This opportunity has sparked the trend in monetization of blogs. Monetization meaning the conversion of all that traffic into a source of revenue for the blogger, bloggers, or owning entities. While wildly successful blogs bringing in large sums of money are rare, the potential for doing so is there and has thus has sparked the creation of even more blogs in the Internet community.
All in all blogs make the world a smarter, if not better, place and the blogging community all in all enjoys providing this benefit for whatever their personal rewards may be.