How to Make Your Own Website on Your Own URL
Anyone can do it. Almost anyone can pay for it. Here’s the step-by-step process to put your own website on your own URL, or more technically, your own Domain (more on this in a bit).
Step 1, chose a domain that’s available. There are roughly 25 domain ‘registrar’s’ that are given the ability to sell unacquired domain names to anyone. GoDaddy is the most well-known example of a domain registrar. You can go to any of these registrar’s sites to see if a domain is available. Alternatively, I like the tool AjaxWhoIs. I can quickly check for domain availability without having to click anything.
Step 2, register the domain name. When you do this, you are acquiring the rites to put anything you want on the domain. Typically, you have the rights for a year, then the registrar will auto-renew the domain a year later. Be careful with this. If there’s any chance that you’ll have your own website for a long period of time, I’d recommend registering the domain for a couple of years.
Step 3, put content on your domain. Before doing this, I’d highly recommend making a list of exactly what tools/content/features you want to make available to your site’s users, as well as the short and long term goals. In many cases, you don’t even need to purchase a hosting account, you can just point your URL to content that’s hosted somewhere else.
For example, if you want to move your blogspot blog or a ning social network to your own URL, you can just set up a DNS record for free.
For basic site content, I’d recommend Wordpress (as does pretty much every blogger) . Wordpress is technically a blogging platform, but you can tweak it to make a site look an e-commerce site, a restaurant menupage, or pretty much anything you want it to look like.
I usually set up hosting accounts with GoDaddy because they have this service called ‘hosting connection’ that will let you drop a wordpress blog on your domain with just a point and click. Alternatively, with other hosting accounts, you usually have to go through the process of setting up a database and linking it with your wordpress files that you later upload onto your server account. Sound complicated? If you haven’t done it before, it definitely can be, but if you use a GoDaddy hosting account, you don’t have to deal with any of this.
Step 4. Make your site look good.
With Wordpress, there are probably tens of thousands of templates that you can install onto your blog. Just upload the template zip file into your file manager, then click ‘unzip’ and choose the folder /wp-content/themes/ . The theme will then show up in your wordpress admin dashboard, where you can instantly turn it on.
One of the best places to find wordpress themes is the official wordpress themes library. I’d also recommend doing some google searches for the type of theme you are looking for ‘e-commerce’ ‘ two column’ ‘plain’ etc . I also sometimes look for wordpress themes in this search engine specifically dedicated to wordpress resources.
Another feature I like to use with Wordpress is setting a default homepage. You can then put whatever you want on the first page that someone sees when they type in yourawesomesite.com . They don’t have to see a list of blog posts.
Step 5, continue to optimize
There’s hundreds, probably thousands of other site creation tools, and more are coming out every day. Most recently devhub and whypark just came out with some quick content tools. Tumblr and NetVibes also let you quickly create dynamic content and then drop it on your own domains. More on this in another post…
