Many of my grand school friends still wonder that I do web developing when I have a master’s degree in Computer Science. This is my childhood dream and I am living it.
In 2012, I decided to start my portfolio – www.dolphianandi.com. I purchased domain and hosting from GoDaddy. I kept it for about a year. In 2013, when I was looking for jobs in Boston, I re-designed and re-did the entire site with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and jQuery.
In 2014, After marrying Matthew, he prompted me to start storyofcooks. As my portfolio was already hosted by Godaddy starting a new website did not cost me too much. But I decided to choose word press as my content management system. Slowly I moved my portfolio to wordpress too.
Anyway, too much technical jargon, right?
Let me tell you how to start a blog, steps by steps! Believe me, it’s not a rocket science.
1. Find a name of your blog.
2. Decide if you want to pay or have a free blog. There are two services I know with which you can open your blog without spending a cent – Blogger and WordPress. Downside of doing that is – you will have {yourdomainname}.blogpost.com or {yourdomainname}.wordpress.com attached to it. If that does not bother you, you’re fine for now.
You can find more information about free blog service provider here.
3. If you don’t like wordpress or blogspot attached to your name (no one likes them anyway), you need have your own domain. So you need to buy them. You can buy domain from many services but I have personally used GoDadddy, Dreamhost and Bluehost (which I strongly suggest). Now people often get confused between hosting providers. I have used 3 (GoDaddy, Dreamhost and Bluehost) and I am telling you Blue is the best. Here are many more hosting service provider if you are wondering.
Domain names are not too costly (Ranges from 8-12 dollars a year unless you want to own Boston.com or nytimes.com).
4. You need to purchase hosting with it. Which means the website space. Imagine website space is like your hard drive where you store your pictures. So if your website website will have many pictures, comments, visitor – you should consider a bigger size of hosting.
5. Choosing a content management system: CMS is nothing but a way to control and publish your content easily on your blog. You can choose either WordPress/Drupal/Joomla. My husband prefers Drupal when I am a WordPress developer (I know my colleagues are hating me so much right now for saying this). Don’t forget Square space which is good for ecommerce blog – and it’s much more pricier.
Here is a few more.
6. You can chose a theme based on your requirement. I wanted a theme, where my recipes and site can have a good layout. I use Themeforest to shop for theme and I strongly recommend you do the same too. Don’t forget to check the ratings of a theme, before purchasing it.
7. SSL certificate: Many friends, colleagues often complain that their site got hacked by a bunch of hacker. WordPress is very much prone to attack so I purchased a secure certificate with my hosting service. Trust me, you can sleep much peacefully at night with this.
8. Make or get a logo.
Let me tell you one thing before I finish off. Don’t get tempted by pinchofyum or other famous bloggers. There is no harm in monetizing but do it slowly. Know and learn before you jump in. Create good quality content; people will come to your site for sure.
This is my first technical post at storyofcooks. In my second post, I will emphasize more on wordpress and wordpress installation.
This could not poslbisy have been more helpful!