Contentedly Maladaptive » Building Your Own Website

Step 6 (Part 2) – A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website

Decidedly Maladaptive — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:00:59 +0000

This is the second part of the sixth post in a series of posts designed to help you set up your own website.

Continuing on from the previous post, where we discussed both the Contact Form 7 and the Akismet plugins, below is a list of useful plugins that you may or may not want to try out on your own website.

It is very difficult to screw things up completely when you try new plugins. Make sure you read the instructions when installing plugins. If you notice something that’s gone wrong with your site after installing a plugin, just de-activate it and see if that solves the problem.

If not, don’t call me.

This is not a good idea

Broken Link Checker – As your blog or website gets larger and larger, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of “dead” links.

Dead links are links that no longer work usually because other websites re-arrange themselves or just go off-line periodically.

Broken Link checker is an excellent way to discover which of your links are still valid and which are not. With this plugin, you will not only see a list of how many (working and non-working) links your site currently has, but you can also fix the broken link easily through the admin screen.

Google XML Sitemaps – One of the easiest ways to get more visitors to your site is to make it easy for search engines to look over what your site is about. Sitemaps streamline this process.

This plugin is very easy to use. You set it once and basically forget it. Every time you add a new post or update a previously-written post, the sitemap is automatically updated and Google is notified of the change.

Page Links To – This surprisingly useful plugin allows you to easily point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. It can be an URL on your site, or on another site. This is a good, simple way to set up navigational links to non-WordPress sections of your site or to off-site resources.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links is a neat little plugin that you can use to automatically link keywords and phrases that you put into your posts as well as those that people leave in their comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

This plugin also allows you to set up a list of keywords that you would like to always be linked to a specific URL. Like, say, an affiliate link. The plugin will do all the work in the background so you don’t have to worry about things.

You can also add the nofollow attribute to those links as well as force them to open in a new window, so people will remain on your site while visiting wherever you chose to send them.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

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Step 6 – Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website

Decidedly Maladaptive — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41:21 +0000

This is the sixth step in a series of posts – a guide that I’m writing that will help walk you through setting up your own website, on your own domain name, using WordPress as a content management system.

Now that you have your website up and running, it’s time to explore the wealth of plugins that are available for WordPress.

Plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great framework to build a website with. There are thousands and thousands of plugins out there that are each designed to do something that WordPress can’t do for itself right out the box.

Some of these plugins are extremely useful and some of them aren’t.

Some of these plugins are free and some of them aren’t.

Just because a plugin is free doesn’t mean that it isn’t as good as a plugin that someone is charging for.

For most people, the first two plugins that they are exposed to are “Akismet” and “Hello Dolly.”

Wordpress Plugin Management Screen

Akismet is a anti-spam plugin that is designed to prevent people from coming onto your new site and leave comment spam. Comment spam is very common on the internet. It involves people (or computer programs) coming to someone’s site and leaving a worthless comment that usually includes links to their own site. Usually this is done to promote someone’s viagra or cialis site.

Hello Dolly is, well, useless.

So first things first, we’re going to activate Akismet and then go on to finding other useful plugins. Go click on “Activate” right under the Akismet tab. That will bring up this screen:

Akismet Almost Ready

WordPress helpfully points out that you need to enter your WordPress API key for Akismet to work. So click on that link, and go to this screen and follow the directions on the detailed diagram below:

Detailed Explanation For How To Configure Akismet

Once you’ve done all that, Akismet will now constantly be working behind the scenes to keep spam off your new website.

But we’re not done adding plugins quite yet. Let’s add a plugin that will allow your readers to contact you via e-mail. First, go to the “Add New” tab under the “Plugins” tab:

WordPress Add New Plugins Screen

And then you search for what you’re looking for – in this case, a contact form:

Searching For A Contact Form

Once you click “Search Plugins” to the right, you get taken to this screen, where you can see the plugins that are available:

Selecting A Contact Form From The Install Plugins Screen

Usually it’s a safe bet to go with the highest rated plugin that performs a particular task, although not always. Due to the fact that I’ve used Contact Form 7 on several sites, I can vouch for it as doing exactly as it says.

So once you click on install, you’ll see this:

Installing Contact Form Plugin

Now that the contact form plugin is installed on your site, click on the “Activate Plugin” link to activate it and go to the next screen:

Contact Form Plugin Activated

Once a plugin is activated there is usually a place on the left-hand-side menu to change the settings for that plugin. Usually the new menu choice can be found under the “Settings” menu tab, but not always.

With the Contact Form 7 plugin, you get your own little menu addition. It looks like this:

Contact Form 7 Plugin Menu

Once you have this up, highlight and copy the code that’s pointed out for you to copy. Note that your left-hand-side menu has changed, it now has a settings tab for the contact form plugin. So once you grab that code up at the top of the screen, let’s set up your new contact form.

You may have wandered through this menu section before – the pages section. Pages are basically parts of your site that are intended to be more static than regular posts. Usually, pages are good spots to put “About Us” sections, menu items and contact forms. This is what the “Pages” section of your site looks like:

WordPress Pages Screen

It’s very important to remember that WordPress Pages are not the same thing as WordPress Posts. Right now we’re just working with pages.

As you get more comfortable with the different concepts, you can fiddle around with creating and deleting pages a bit more. For now, just do what I tell you or you’ll get a knife in the throat.

How To Create A Contact Page In WordPress

As you can see in the detailed and professionally-done image above, there are several elements to be aware of when looking at the “Add New Page” screen in WordPress.

First and foremost is the page title field. This is where you put the title of the page. In this instance, it’s going to be “Contact Allen” – because we want people to contact Allen. Because he’s so friendly and loving.

Once that’s done, click on the HTML code tab. This will show you everything in an HTML friendly way. If you put code into your pages at some point, you will want to use this tab. If you have your HTML tab up, you can paste that Contact Form 7 code that you copied earlier into the field that actually contains the content of the page. I’ve helpfully labeled it “You Write Stuff Here.”

For pages, you’ll probably want to go to the “Discussions” section at the bottom and uncheck “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings.” Contact pages don’t need to have the ability for people to leave comments on them.

Here’s what I added for AllenSelby.com’s contact page:

Contact Page Almost Done

Note the “Url” that I pointed out. If you ever want to send someone directly to this contact page, you can just send them that url. WordPress is nice in that it handles all that behind-the-scenes stuff.

So, once you have your contact page set up, hit “Publish” and go to your site. There, you’ll see something like this:

AllenSelby.com Now Has A Contact Page

Notice that I now have a new page – the “Contact Allen” page. You should have something like that on your site now. If someone goes to your domain, they will now have the opportunity to fill in the fields, hit send and magically send a message to you!

And that’s just awesome.

Feel free to experiment with plugins and see what works best for you. In the next post I’ll list a slew of WordPress plugins that I’ve used in the past and that I’ve found useful.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 5 – Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website

Decidedly Maladaptive — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:28:43 +0000

This is the fifth step in a series of posts – a guide that I’m writing that will help walk you through setting up your own website, on your own domain name, using WordPress as a content management system.

Now that you’ve completed the previous step and installed the basic WordPress installation onto your own server space by using Fantastico, you now should have something that looks like this up on your domain name when you type it into your browser:

What A WordPress Default Install Looks Like

Your new web page will not come up if you search for it using Google or Yahoo at the moment. This is good, because it is inconsiderately ugly. We will change that shortly, but right now we’re going to change the default settings that new WordPress installs always start out with. Because they’re defaults.

To change anything on your website, you need to log into the administration area of the site. You can do this from any browser, anywhere in the world. Simply go to “http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin” and this is where you’re taken to:

Wordpress Admin Login Screen

Type in your administrator login name and the appropriate password (you do have that written down, don’t you?) and you’re taken to this screen:

Wordpress Dashboard Screen

What you have here is the WordPress dashboard screen. You will be seeing a lot of this.

There is a good amount of information on the WordPress dashboard. You can, if you click on the screen options tab on the very top of the screen under “Howdy, Your Name,” change what you see on the dashboard.

Dashboard Customization Options

I usually remove the QuickPress section, along with the Recent Drafts, WordPress Development Blog, Other WordPress News and Plugins sections. You can do the same, or leave them all up. You can, if you have a wide enough screen, make your dashboard have 3 or 4 columns and spread everything out however you like. It’s quite flexible.

Once you have set your dashboard up the way you like, it’s time to go to the WordPress settings tab down here to the left:

Here Is The WordPress Settings Tab

As you get more familiar with WordPress, you will undoubtedly begin to be more comfortable with the various settings and features within WordPress. Because this is your first website, however, I will give you a quick rundown of the settings you should change and the settings you should not change.

The first section of the Settings tab is the General settings section. Here you can change things like the title of the site, the tagline, the administrator e-mail and the date and time display formats. Right now we’re just going to change the time zone to whatever you feel is most appropriate. Since both I and Allen Selby are in Omaha, I’ll change the UTC time manually to -5 hours and click “Save Changes” on the bottom of the screen:

Change The UTC Time Setting To Your Own

That done, go to the Writing tab under the settings and change the size of the post box to 15 or 20. This is strictly a personal preference. I like to see more of what I’m writing and 10 lines makes me feel like I’m writing with a visored helmet on. Save the changes and go down to the Reading Tab.

Decide To Show Either A Static Front Page Or Your Latest Posts

This is the point where you have to start making decisions about what you want this website to be.

If this is a website for a brick and mortar business, it might be a good idea to choose to show visitors to the site a static page that tells them about the business, the business location and the services that it offers. You’ll still be able to have users read the individual posts that you’ll be making, but every time they go to the site, they’ll see the static page that you select instead of seeing a list of the 10 latest posts you’ve made.

If this is going to be a less formal site, maybe a personal site or something along that line, you can leave this as it is. When people go to the site, they’ll see the latest post you’ve made at the top, followed by every other post underneath it in reverse chronological order. The newest posts will be at the top of the page with the oldest posts being pushed to the bottom.

There are really no hard and fast rules for making either choice. Plenty of businesses run their website as a business blog, telling customers about the latest company news, offers, coupons and so on. Other businesses update infrequently and are more interested in just maintaining a web presence.

So make your decision, save the change and go to the Discussion tab, where you will see this screen:

Wordpress Discussion Settings Screen

On this page, you’re going to want to make sure these settings are checkmarked:

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
Allow link notifications from other blogs
Allow people to post comments on new articles
Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
Enable threaded (nested) comments

On your first website, you also want to be e-mailed whenever anyone posts a comment or a comment is held for moderation. You can always change that later if you start getting a lot of visitors and comments.

To the right of where it says Comment Moderation, change the 2 to a 1 in the box between Hold a comment in the queue if it contains and or more links. That will help filter out spam comments.

Everything else can wait for later. For now, go to the Privacy settings tab, where you will see this:

Wordpress Privacy Settings Screen

For right now, you should leave this alone, but you should be aware of what this is, because once you get your site set up the way you want it, and with some useful content, you’ll want to change this setting from the default. For right now, keep this set to: I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors.

Now go to the next tab down, the Permalinks tab, where you will see this:

Wordpress Default Permalink Settings

Search engines like Google and Yahoo like web pages to be descriptive of what they’re about.

Say I have a page on AllenSelby.com about how much Allen loves tooth whitening services in Omaha. If I want that page to rank higher when people search for “Omaha tooth whitening services” in Google, then I should do everything I can to help Google identify what that page is about – Omaha tooth whitening services.

One of the factors that goes into how high a web page ranks for a search term is the permalink structure.

Right now, with the default permalink settings, if I had a page on this site about tooth whitening, it could have an url of, say, “http://allenselby.com/?p123″ – which is not very helpful to Google when it comes to telling what the page is about. As a result of the poor permalink structure, if all other factors were even, Google would probably rank me a bit lower than a site with better permalink structure.

But if I changed the permalink structure to, oh, “http://allenselby.com/omaha-tooth-whitening-services” – well that would tell Google right off the bat to start thinking about Omaha tooth whitening services while crawling this page.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make your site have more descriptive titles for the pages you eventually write.

Click on the Month and Name radio button, like this:

Changing WordPress Permalink Structure

When you do that, the code – /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ – comes up in the box to the right of Custom Structure. This is good, but we can do better. Delete everything in that box but – /%postname%/ and then click Save Changes. Make it look like this before you save the changes:

Optimizing The Permalink Structure In WordPress

With that done, your blog is almost ready for you to put some content on it.

The next step is working with plugins. After that, I’ll show you how to change the look of your new site to something more interesting than the default theme.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 4 – Using Fantastico To Install WordPress

Decidedly Maladaptive — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:58:11 +0000

This is the fourth step in a series of posts that are intended to serve as a roadmap for those who are interested in setting up their own website for whatever reason.

By this point, you should have already have pointed your domain to your web host’s nameservers and allowed enough time for those changes to propagate. You should also have logged into your cPanel once or twice, using the login and password found on the e-mail that your web host sent you when you signed up for your account.

What we’re going to do now is install the basic framework of the website – the content management system, or CMS for short.

While there are quite a few choices you have when it comes to picking a CMS, the one I usually end up going with is WordPress, for several reasons.

WordPress is easy to use, making it simple to update content on your website without knowing HTML or how to use a complex editor tool like Dreamweaver, or hiring someone every time you want to make a small change to your website. You can actually update your WordPress website anywhere that you have internet access and a web browser.
WordPress is flexible and powerful because there are a ton of developers and programmers out there who are busy developing themes and plugins for use with WordPress websites. WordPress makes it easy to customize your website and do little (or big) things to set it apart from every other site that’s out there.
WordPress is easy to install, especially if you have cPanel and Fantastico, like you get with a Liquid Web or Hawk Host web hosting account.

Fantastico is a tool that you have at your disposal that allows for a quick, easy installation of the WordPress framework onto your domain name. Once you log into your cPanel, you can find Fantastico on your cPanel home screen, like so:

cPanel home screen with Fantastico helpfully pointed out

So look for the little smiley face Fantastico icon and click it to go to this screen:

Fantastico home screen with WordPress section helpfully pointed out

This is your Fantastico home screen, where you have any number of scripts that will install all sorts of fun things. I’d love to go into all your options, but I’m not going to because life is full of disappointment and you should be getting used to that by now. So just click on the “WordPress” link on the left hand side of the screen.

Fantastico WordPress installation section

Because this is the first time you’ve installed WordPress on your server space, this will be blank. Once you’re at this screen, click the “New Installation” link, which will bring you to the following screen:

Fantastico WordPress install - step 1

Fill in the appropriate information. Since I’m using the domain name AllenSelby.com, I select that from the drop-down menu. Then I leave the next space – the “Install in Directory” space – blank.

In the Admin Access area, select the login name and password that you want to use. I highly suggest that you select something other than “admin” for the login name and that you make the password as complex as you can remember.

In the Base Configuration area choose the name that you would like to appear on your posts. If you have a name you regularly go by on the internet, this is a good place to put it. Or you can use your business name, or whatever. This should be different than the admin login.

Choose an e-mail address that you check regularly.

Put the name of the website – in this case AllenSelby – and a tagline for the website.

Once you’ve done all that, click on “Install WordPress” to go to the next screen.

Fantastico WordPress Install Step 2

This shows you an overview of some of the options you selected on the previous screen and basically serves as a “Do you really want to do that?” screen. You do, so click “Finish Installation” to go to the next screen here:

Fantastico WordPress install - step 3

Ok, WordPress is now installed on your domain name and you have everything you need to get started on the next step. You can go visit your website if you like, although it will be very plain at the moment.

I recommend that you use that box down below to e-mail yourself the details of the installation for safekeeping and later reference.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 3 – Pointing Your Domain Name To Your Web Host

Decidedly Maladaptive — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:32:52 +0000

This is the third step in a series of posts I’m writing that will help you set up your own website, with your own domain.

After you finished the last step and signed up for web hosting, at the end of the process your new web host sent you an e-mail giving you all the details of your new account. It probably included things like your user name, your password, cPanel login information and so on.

Most importantly – for this step anyway – that e-mail probably sent you the nameservers that your host uses. You need to have those nameservers in order to follow this step.

To help you find them in that e-mail, nameservers look like this: ns1.yourdomain.com or ns2.yourdomain.com

You will usually be given two nameservers by your web host to use – the primary (ns1.yourdomain.com) and the secondary (ns2.yourdomain.com).

Once you have those two nameservers, you go to your domain registrar, log into your account and find the domain management screen.

Click Here To Go to GoDaddy Domain Management Screen

Once you’re at your domain management screen, you should see the domain that you registered. The domain should have the date you registered it and the status of the domain. Right now it’s just sitting there, in much the same manner that a fire doesn’t.

Oh Look There Is the Domain Name

If people go to allenselby.com right now (or your website), before you set the nameservers, they won’t see anything useful at all. In order for people to type in “allenselby.com” into their web browser and get to what I want to show them, I have to point the domain name to the web host.

Think of your web server as an apartment or a rented retail space. Your web host rents that space, collects the money and keeps up the property.

A domain name is an address. Short, catchy addresses are easier to remember than long, complicated addresses.

A nameserver setting is like a phone book listing. It shows people how to get to your retail space.

So what we want to do now is put our nameserver settings into GoDaddy so people will be able to find our website.

All we have to do is click on the box next to the domain name and the nameserver button becomes clickable:

What Clicking On The Box By The Domain Name Does

And now you click on the button marked “Nameservers” to go to this screen:

You Want To Tell GoDaddy You Host Your Domains With Another Provider

You don’t want to park your domain. Parking a domain means that you’ve registered it, but you’re not doing anything with it. Unless you do something with the domain that you register, like point it at your webhost, GoDaddy will monetize it themselves. They’ll slap some ads on it and hope for regular folks to type in the name of the domain into their browser (which happens with surprising regularity, depending on the domain name) and hopefully click on an ad or two.

Clicking That Button Brings Up These Nameserver Fields

Right now, GoDaddy has your domain pointed at their web servers, as you can see here. The current settings are ns29.domaincontrol.com and ns30.domaincontrol.com. This is done automatically when you register the domain, but we’re now going to change the settings to point at your web host’s nameservers.

Enter Your Own Nameservers

Once you’ve put your own nameservers (and I guarantee that they’re not ns1.yournameserver.com or ns2.yournameserver.com), click OK. You’ll be taken to this confirmation screen:

Your Changes Have Now Been Submitted

You’ll have to wait from a few minutes to a few hours for your nameserver changes to propagate, depending on how busy the world is at the time. GoDaddy is very quick at this, usually. Some domain name registrars can take up to 72 hours, which is another reason why GoDaddy is one of my registrars of choice.

Once the nameserver change propagates, you’ll be able to go to the next step and start putting up your own website.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 2 – Choosing A Web Hosting Company – Liquid Web

Decidedly Maladaptive — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:24:10 +0000

This is the second part of the second step in the guide to setting up your own website on your own domain.

Now, if you go to the Liquid Web website and browse around for a bit, you’ll get a little pop-up chat box that will connect you to one of the Liquid Web sales staff. After a while, you notice that they want to talk to you, answer any questions you might have, settle any concerns that might crop up.

You know a company is interested in providing great customer service when they go to all lengths to get you to talk to them – and that goes double for companies who are internet-based.

It seems that more and more businesses out there that provide services are more interested in avoiding their customers – answering questions by sending you a link to their FAQ page or e-mailing you a canned response. While that approach to customer service is a great way to save a considerable amount of money for the company, it does tend to prevent customers from developing a strong sense of loyalty for that company.

Liquid Web has been around since 1997 and has all the technical expertise you would want in a web host with over 150 engineers that pride themselves on Heroic Support. When they say Heroic Support, they really mean Heroic Support. It’s that good. While most web hosts promote a 99.9% uptime guarantee, Liquid Web boasts a full 100% uptime guarantee. If you absolutely, positively want your website to be available all the time, that’s a big plus in Liquid Web’s favor.

Liquid Web owns, engineers and operates their own data centers – 3 of them – which sets them apart from most other web hosts who just rent out space from other, larger web hosts. The level of security and redundancy that they’ve built into their web hosting services is really outstanding.

While Liquid Web’s business focus is really on managed Virtual Private Servers and managed Dedicated Servers, they do have some stellar shared hosting packages that they offer to the people who don’t necessarily need the power – or expense – of the higher-priced hosting options.

Liquid Web Shared Hosting Packages

Like most web hosting companies, Liquid Web has several different levels of shared hosting that they offer their customers.

The lowest-priced shared hosting package that Liquid Web offers goes for $14.95 per month. For that price, you get:

24×7 Toll Free Phone Support
Two Free Domain Names
Site Studio Software
CPanel + Fantastico Auto Installer
1GB RAID Protected Disk Space
120GB Premium Multi-Homed Bandwidth

While this may not seem like a good deal when you compare numbers with Hawk Host shared hosting services, you have to look at everything. Liquid Web offers a great deal more bandwidth than Hawk Host does, but less storage. Storage isn’t a problem on most websites, however – bandwidth, and to an even-greater extent, CPU usage is.

Liquid Web is upfront about how much CPU usage your website can take up on their shared hosting server – 15%. That’s good for a shared hosting environment. Remember – if your site is taking up more than your fair share of server resources, all the other sites on the server suffer.

The second tier of shared hosting that Liquid Web offers is $19.95 a month. For that, you get:

24×7 Toll Free Phone Support
Three Free Domain Names
Site Studio Software
CPanel + Fantastico Auto Installer
1500MB RAID Protected Disk Space
200GB Premium Multi-Homed Bandwidth

This would not be my choice for shared hosting packages. Just 5$ more per month gets you up to the next tier, which is much more attractive.

The highest-priced shared hosting package that Liquid Web offers goes for $24.95 a month and provides:

Static IP Address
24×7 Toll Free Phone Support
One Dedicated IP Address
Five Free Domain Names or a free SSL Certificate
Site Studio Software
CPanel + Fantastico Auto Installer
2500MB RAID Protected Disk Space
320GB Premium Multi-Homed Bandwidth

While free domain name registration may seem like a good deal, it’s only free for a year. After that, you’re charged. I wouldn’t even bother with it. The free SSL Certificate is a good deal, but it also is only free for a year.

The site studio software may be nice, but for the purposes of this guide it’s unimportant.

The static, dedicated IP address is usually a $2-$5 dollar monthly option with other shared web hosts, and it’s good to see that feature included in Liquid Web’s top shared hosting tier.

Liquid Web Pros

Heroic Customer Service – This is their company motto and they’re very serious about it. They go above and beyond to help you through whatever problem you’re having, and that’s valuable for people who might not know exactly what they’re doing.
Bandwidth – Always a plus, and Liquid Web gives you more.
Uptime guarantee – Liquid Web guarantees your server will be up 100% of the time.

Liquid Web Cons

Price – There is no doubt that, for many people, price is the top concern when it comes to web hosting. And price is important. You need to feel like you’re getting a good return on your investment, that what you’re buying has a good value. Ultimately you have to decide for yourself as to whether or not the higher prices Liquid Web charges shared hosting customers are a good value for you.

When it comes down to choosing Hawk Host or Liquid Web, you have to ask yourself some questions.

Is cost my biggest factor?

Yes? Then go with Hawk Host.

Is uptime and fanatically devoted technical support people the most important factor?

Yes? Then go with Liquid Web.

Continuing the car analogy from the previous post about choosing a web host, if Hawk Host is a Lexus, Liquid Web is a Bentley or Rolls Royce. You really can’t go wrong with either one.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 2 – Choosing A Web Hosting Company – Hawk Host

Decidedly Maladaptive — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:44:42 +0000

This is the first part of the second step in a series of posts I’m writing that will help you set up your own website, with your own domain.

As I’ve mentioned before, setting up your own website involves following a short series of steps, and the second step to building your own website is finding a place to put your websites files – choosing a web hosting company.

If you do a search on Google for “web hosting” you’ll quickly find that there are thousands upon thousands of web hosting companies out there – all anxious to get the new webmaster (you) to sign on the dotted line and pick up one of their web hosting packages.

This is good in the sense that competition drives the price down, but bad in the sense that it confuses the hell out of the average person out there who is trying to sort the wheat from the chaff.

It seems like everyone’s offering “unlimited bandwidth” and “unlimited number of domains” and “unlimited storage.” Unfortunately, although those phrases sound great, they really mean jack squat.

Why? Well..

A web host that’s costing you $5 per month for hosting isn’t really going to offer you unlimited bandwidth – because they’d be out of business in a month if they did.

A web host that’s offering you an unlimited number of domains and databases that can be hosted on your shared space is still going to limit you in another way – to a small portion of the CPU power available on the server.

While both those limitations are normal in the web hosting business, they usually don’t come up as a problem for people until they reach the point where they get their service cut off with no warning. That’s hugely frustrating to most people, and is probably why World War 2 got started.

I’ve had several accounts with different web hosting providers and the two that I recommend to anyone are Hawk Host and Liquid Web:

A well-thought-out company has a target clientèle that they’ve set their business up to attract and support. While other types of customers can be attracted to their services, they’re not the intended customers and may find the company’s services either too limited or too costly.

Both these web hosting companies are looking for completely different customers, but I’ll give you the rundown on both companies and let you decide which is right for you.

Hawk Host Overview

I was turned onto Hawk Host by Michael Lankton – a friend of mine who likes to think he knows something about everything, like me. While he’s wrong when it comes to motorcycles and music, he’s right when it comes to web hosting.

Hawk Host is looking for customers on a budget who know what they’re looking for – a cheap, reliable web host with fast servers and no problems.

One of the things I like most about Hawk Host is that they keep the overselling to an absolute minimum.

Shared hosting providers are notorious for overselling their servers, in the hopes that all the people buying web hosting from them won’t actually use it. That’s fine for the majority of websites out there, but if and when your site starts getting some decent traffic, you don’t want it to be brought down because the server that it is sitting on can’t handle it.

Another thing I like about Hawk Host is that they have pretty generous CPU limits and, in addition to that, they won’t just pull the plug on you if you exceed them.

CPU limits are important. As your website starts attracting more and more readers, each reader that hits your site is going to cost you CPU cycles. If you start using up too many of those cycles, your usual web host will shut you down for an hour or so at the best, or permanently at the worst.

You do not want this to happen. It is bad.

Imagine someone coming into your house and turning off your computer while you’re finishing up your first novel and you haven’t saved for the last day or so.

Yeah, that bad.

So if you’re wanting to sign up for Hawk Host, here’s what you do:

Click the link here -> Hawk Host.

Click either the “Sign Up Now” button on their front page to sign up for their $5.95 monthly service, or go to the “Web Hosting” tab on the top of their page and select the hosting package you’re most comfortable with. You’ll be taken to this screen:

Hawk Host Domain Name Selection Screen

Because you’ve already registered a domain name, you want to select the “I will update my nameservers on an existing domain Or I will register a new domain” radio button and put in your domain name, like this:

Setting Domain Name With Hawk Host

Once you go to the next screen, you see this:

Selecting Hosting Billing Options With Hawk Host

If you’re really in a pinch for cash, you can go with the monthly billing. I would advise against it, however, just for the simple reason that you’ll be saving money over the long run if you pay for a year’s worth of service – especially if you use one of the discount codes that you should be using. So, follow my advice and pay for a year’s worth of service in advance.

My Preferred Hawk Host Billing Settings

Don’t worry about getting a dedicated IP address right now, unless it’s something you have experience with and know that you want. So select the 12 month price and either pick the server location that you like the best or let Hawk Host pick for you. Once you hit “Update Cart” you’ll be taken to this screen:

Hawk Host Confirm Order Page

Look this over to make sure you didn’t type your domain name in wrong or anything like that. Then focus on that little box that says “Promotional Code” and open a new tab.

You’re going to want to search for current Hawk Host promotional codes. Here, let me Google that for you. Look for a code that gets you 30-40 percent off the first payment and either write it down or highlight it, then right click and copy it.

I found a great coupon code for Hawk Host – october2009 – which you can just copy and paste into the little box there and enjoy a 45% off discount for your first year’s worth of hosting:

Price For A Year Of Hawk Host Hosting After Discount Code Applied

Hawk Host puts out a different set of coupons every month, and coupons expire regularly, so just keep looking and experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. It seems like you could try the current month and year format that they’re using and get a great deal, so try that first and see what happens.

Once you get a coupon code you’re happy with, click the “Checkout” button and go to this screen:

Hawk Host Checkout and Payment Page

If you don’t know what to do at this point, you’re better off making whistles in Uganda. Seriously, step away from the computer and take up lifting things as a hobby, or maybe take up thinking about how pretty rabbits are and how you’d like to pet them.

Pay with a credit card. They give you better protection than PayPal does and possible reward points.

Pick a good, secure password. Write it down and keep it in your wallet. Use a number/letter/symbol combination. It’s best to get into the habit of picking secure passwords now.

Once you pay, you’ll get an e-mail from Hawk Host with all the IP addresses, nameservers and other information you’ll need to complete the next steps. Save that e-mail, please.

Since this post has already passed 1200 words, I’ll split this post into two different sections, giving you the lowdown on Liquid Web in the next section.

Hawk Host Pros

Cost – If you can’t find a Hawk Host plan that fits your budget, you might want to either reconsider setting up a website or maybe start thinking about getting a second job of some kind. Selling some plasma, maybe. Hawk Host’s hosting plans are even cheaper when you factor in online discount codes and coupons.
Reliability – 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is good.
Fast Servers – In my experience, comparing Hawk Host’s servers to other shared hosting providers is like comparing a Lexus to a Hyundai.
Customer Support – It’s like the guy lives at the office. I’ve always had fast customer service with Hawk Host, with e-mails usually coming back within an hour with either a solution I can implement or announcing that they’ve already fixed the problem.

Hawk Host Cons

Does not offer the same level of technical support as companies that provide managed servers.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 1 – Registering A Domain Name

Decidedly Maladaptive — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:10:49 +0000

This is the first step in a series of posts that I’m writing to serve you as a guide to help you set up your own website, on your own domain.

Like I just said, setting up your own website involves following a short series of steps, and the first step to building your own website is choosing and registering your own domain name.

There’s no shortage of domain name registrars in the world, but the one that I have been using the most often is GoDaddy.

One of the nicest things about GoDaddy is that they have customer service that’s just a phone call away – and they’re American, native-english-speaking customer service people.

There’s nothing more frustrating than calling a customer service number for a technical problem and getting a non-native-english speaking customer service representative.

Since I want you to have the easiest time possible setting up your own website, you’re going to want to use companies that use native-english-speaking customer service representatives whenever possible.

GoDaddy Home Page

Once you’re at GoDaddy.com, bring up another window or tab and go to BustAName.com.

BustAName Homepage

Now in my humble opinion, the first domain that you should register is a domain that contains your name.

Why?

Well, whenever possible, you should own your own “brand.” This means that whenever someone searches for your name on the internet, you can control or craft what the top results are for that search. You don’t have to put a website up on your domain name, but it’s nice to have the option to do that at some point.

So go to BustAName and check to see if your name is available as a .com.

Allen Selby Should Register His Name

Allen Selby, as you can see here, has not done his due diligence and registered his name as a domain name. This is possibly because Allen Selby is a troglodyte, albeit a troglodyte with a very nice motorcycle.

At this point, anyone could register Allen Selby’s name as a .com and do something horrible with it. As an object lesson for the rest of you, that is exactly what I am going to do.

Searching For Domain On GoDaddy

So after signing into GoDaddy on my account, I type the name into the box and click “Search now!”

Yes The Domain Is Available

Oh good, the domain name is available. So, I click on “Add and Proceed to Checkout,” and get this screen:

Example Of A GoDaddy Upsale

GoDaddy is very good at upselling. They obviously want you to register the .net, the .org, and as many other extensions of the same domain as possible. Depending on what you intend on doing, this might be a good deal. It’s always a good idea to see what kind of upsale deal GoDaddy will give you on a domain. You can save a decent chunk of change by waiting to see what they’ll offer you on their next screen.

For now, however, we’re going to decline their offer and go to the next screen.

Choosing Private Registration And Registration Length On GoDaddy

That screen will change, depending on how many domain names you have in your checkout cart, but it will have the same options on it, generally. The default setting for registration length is 5 years, but you’re going to be pre-paying for that entire length of time. Usually people register a domain for 1 or 2 years, so that’s what I’m going to select here.

Checking Out Is Hard To Do On GoDaddy

Now, you’re going to want to select private registration, but don’t do it here. Once you’ve selected 1 or two years from the drop down menu, scroll down, select the “No thanks. I’m ready to checkout.” radio button and click “Continue.”

Selecting Private Registration On GoDaddy

On the above screen, I can change the amount of years I want to register the domain for and select the private registration option, if I want.

Why would you want to select private registration?

Well, if you go to WhoIs, you can look up any website you like and, unless it’s been registered privately, see the contact information (including name, address, phone number and e-mail address) of the person registering the website. So if you want all that information out there for scammers, spammers and identity thieves to take, by all means, don’t select private registration and save yourself 9 bucks.

Where You Put GoDaddy Promo Codes

Before you check out, you need to search for coupon codes to drop the price a bit. So hit Google, search for “GoDaddy coupon codes” and find yourself something that is current. It can sometimes take a bit of searching before you find something that works, but it can potentially save you a good amount, especially if you’re registering a lot of domains.

Coupon Code Applied And A Little Money Saved

Once you have that done, and you’re happy with your order, scroll down the page, check off the Terms Of Service agreements that go with private registration and go to the checkout page. Once there, put in your credit card information and buy your domain.

The next step in the process is selecting a web hosting company and setting up web hosting, which I will walk you through just like I did here with the domain selecting process.

If you have any questions or current GoDaddy coupons, use the comment section below.

Domain Selection Tips:

In general, when picking a domain name, you want to follow these tips whenever possible:

It is better to get a longer .com than it is to get a shorter .net – but if you can, get all three. When anyone goes to an internet site, they go to the .com first. It’s the extension that everyone associates with the internet. Any other extension, like .org or .net is just going to confuse people.

When you’re selecting a domain name, leave out dashes and numbers. If you have a choice between good-domain.com, gooddomain1.com and gooddomain.net, take the .net. Nobody remembers to put dashes or numbers into the address bar on their browser. Besides, domains with numbers and dashes in them just look spammy.

Pick a domain name that describes what you do, with the fewest letters possible. If you’re a plumber in Omaha, register omahaplumber.com if it’s available, along with your business name. If not, go with omahaplumbingservice, bestomahaplumber.com, or emergencyomahaplumber.com or any number of combinations. This is why BustAName is such a good tool to use – it shows you available combinations so you can compare them and find the best name. The shorter the name that you register, the easier it is for people to remember and type in. Every additional letter is a potential typing error.

If you can’t come up with a descriptive domain name, go the other way and focus on branding. Depending on your site’s focus, pick a memorable short name that will stick in people’s minds, get a great logo and include the name prominently in your advertising and marketing. Branding is more complicated than that, but if you ask your friends and relatives if a domain name you’re thinking about sticks in their head and they say “yes”, you’re on the right track.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Building Your Own Website – A Step By Step Guide

Decidedly Maladaptive — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:00:54 +0000

I’ve been working at a jail now for over 5 years.

It’s a decent job. The people are interesting, the work is easy, the pay is good and every now and then I get to hit someone with a chair.

On the side, however, I manage a stable of 120 or 140 websites, which bring in a considerable amount of money each month. Nothing crazy, but enough so that my wife doesn’t have to worry about working while she finishes up her student teaching.

Every few days or so, someone I work with says to me, “Hey, you have a lot of web sites, and you make some extra cash with them.”

And I say, “Yes. Yes I do.”

And then they usually ask me, “Well, when you get a chance, do you think you can show me how I can set up my own website? I’d love to make a little money on the side.”

And then I say, “Sure, not a problem.”

At this point they ask me, “Well, what are your days off?”

To which I reply, “Thursday and Friday are good, except on Thursday I’m really only available from 9 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon or so. After that I’m spending time with the kids and my wife.”

They usually say, “Ok.”

And then I continue, “On Fridays I’m watching two of the kids while the third is at preschool until 11:30 in the morning, at which point I then will drive over there with all the kids in tow and pick him up and bring him back home. Then I make lunch for all three, put the baby down and shoehorn whatever website work I can while he’s asleep and the other two are playing Left4Dead. That is, if I’m not killing hordes of zombies alongside my 3-year-old and my 5-year-old.”

At that point we usually exchange numbers and I never hear from the person again, which is really too bad – because it really is very easy to build your own website. And once you have your own website, you can usually make a little money with it. And once you can make a little money with your website, you can usually duplicate the process over and over again until eventually you sit back and realize: “Hey, I’m making a lot of money with this.”

The biggest problem with building websites – at least for most of the people I talk to – is getting started with the process. Because most people aren’t comfortable with much more than Facebook or MySpace, putting together a decent website looks way more complicated than it is. Adding to the problem is that most people don’t know where to look for information on building their own website and don’t know what information is current. There’s a lot of information out there that is dated, biased, trying to sell you something or just plain wrong.

I am hoping that the guide to building websites that I’m putting together, that I’ll post here over the next few days will make the whole web page building process a little clearer and easier to follow for the people who are interested in that sort of thing.

For those of you who want a quick overview of what this guide will include, here it is:

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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